Anand (Anand, P. 1985. Testing regret. Management Sci. 31 114--116.) has suggested that measuring the sacrifice a person is prepared to make to avoid regret may be more difficult than I suggest in Bell (Bell, D. E. 1983. Risk premiums for decision regret. Management Sci. 29 1156--1166.). Though...

Some people find decision making under uncertainty difficult because they fear making the "wrong decision," wrong in the sense that the outcome of their chosen alternative proves to be worse than could have been achieved with another alternative. These people may be willing to pay a premium to...

Expected utility theory is widely acknowledged to be a rational approach to making decisions involving risk. Yet the methodology gives no explicit role to measures of risk and return. In this paper we identify those families of utility functions that are compatible with a risk-return...

Consider the relative attractiveness to a decision maker of two financial gambles as the wealth of that individual varies. It may seem reasonable that either one alternative should be preferred for all wealth levels or that there exists a unique critical wealth level at which the decision maker...

The linear plus exponential utility function has received increasing attention of late as a particularly attractive family for evaluating additive gambles for wealth. In addition to its ability to reflect increasing appreciation for money, risk aversion, and decreasing risk aversion, it is...

Methodologies developed in the last several years allow formal inclusion of two sources of complexity in the analysis of a decision problem--uncertainty and multiple conflicting objectives. Uncertainty can be handled by assessing the decision maker's attitude towards risk in the form of a von...

If an alternative is attractive only at certain wealth levels of a decision maker, typically above some critical level, then there will be occasions when it is better to enter into an independent side bet prior to making a decision, than to accept or reject the alternative outright.

A fundamental problem in managing product development is the optimal timing, frequency, and fidelity of sequential testing activities that are carried out to evaluate novel product concepts and designs. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model that treats testing as an activity that...

Suppose that your choice between uncertain financial prospects is made more difficult by two independent contextual uncertainties concerning the size of your existing wealth. One contextual uncertainty has a greater spread than the other. If you could resolve one of these contextual...