Three reasons for why people may evaluate utility in a rank-dependent fashion have been suggested: (1) rank-dependent weighting is a function of perceptual biases and thus not prescriptively defensible; (2) weights are (re)distributed by motivational processes which reflect stable personality...

This article compares classical expected utility (EU) with the more general rank-dependent utility (RDU) models. The difference between the independence condition for preferences of EU and its comonotonic generalization in RDU provides the exact demarcation between EU and rank-dependent models....