Probabilities as Similarity-Weighted Frequencies

Itzhak Gilboa (1) , Antoine Billot (2, 3) , Dov Samet , David Schmeidler

1 TAU - Tel Aviv University
2 PJSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques
3 LEM - Laboratoire d'Économie Moderne

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that, if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are a similarity-weighted average of the beliefs induced by each past case.

Keywords: Probability; similarity; case-based reasoning; relative frequencies

Domains: Economy and decision science

Itzhak Gilboa, Antoine Billot, Dov Samet, David Schmeidler. Probabilities as Similarity-Weighted Frequencies. Econometrica, 2005, Vol.73, n°4, pp. 1125-1136. ⟨10.1111/j.1468-0262.2005.00611.x⟩. ⟨hal-00481235⟩