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"Serial T-138/62." ; "20 July 1962." ; Office of Naval Research, contract ; Mode of access: Internet. ; 2

AbstractIn expected utility many results have been derived that give necessary and/or sufficient conditions for a multivariate utility function to be decomposable into lower‐dimensional functions. In particular, multilinear, multiplicative and additive decompositions have been widely discussed. These utility functions can be more easily assessed in practical situations.In this paper we present a theory of decomposition in the context of nonadditive expected utility such as anticipated utility or Choquet expected utility. We show that many of the results used in conventional expected utility carry over to these more general frameworks.If preferences over lotteries depend only on the marginal probability distributions, then in expected utility the utility function is additively decomposable. We show that in anticipated utility the marginality condition implies not only that the utility function is additively decomposable but also that the distortion function is the identity function. We further demonstrate that a decision maker who is bivariate risk neutral has a utility function that is additively decomposable and a distortion function q for which q(½) = ½.

The paper builds upon an original pre- and post-election survey that we conducted before and after the 2015 Canadian election. Directly after Election Day, we asked Canadians for which party they voted, and whether they regret their choice. We find that 39% of them are not perfectly happy with their decision, and 4% even say that they made a bad decision. We show that the propensity to regret can be explained by a mixed-utility theory, whereby voters attempt to maximize a mixture of instrumental and expressive utilities. Our study contributes to the literatures on voting behavior and political economy, which usually considers that voters are either instrumental or expressive, but not both at the same time.

Conventional utility theory models customer preferences in terms of actual performance and does not use benchmarks. But empirical work in gap analysis shows that customer preferences clearly depend on the disparity between performance and some benchmark. To resolve this apparent discrepancy between theory and experiment, this article shows that a simple reinterpretation of utility makes utility a function of the uncertainty-discounted gap between actual performance and a benchmark. The author interprets the benchmark as reflecting customer product expectations. The resulting formulation is used to derive a consumer choice model in which customer choice depends on how perceived performance compares to expectations and on customer uncertainty about performance and expectations. In this model, increasing information on a product or service tends to increase its sales if its performance is above customer expectations and to decrease its sales if its performance is below customer expectations.