IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00798216.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A theory of regret and information

Author

Listed:
  • Emmanuelle Gabillon

    (GREThA - Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée - UB - Université de Bordeaux - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Following Quiguin (1994), we propose a general model of preferences that accounts for individuals\' regret concerns. By confronting the commonly-accepted additive and multiplicative regret utility functions to this model, we establish certain characteristics that these utility functions require to be in conformity with our preferences model. Equally, as regret is intrinsically related to the concept of information about the foregone alternatives, we generalize our framework so that it can accomodate any information structure. We show that the less informative that structure is, the higher the utility of a regretful individual. This result means that an individual prefers not to be exposed to ex post information about the foregone alternatives. We also focus on information value, and consider two cases. That of flexibility, where information arrives before the choice and can be used to determine the optimal strategy; that of non-flexibility, where information arrives after the choice. We show that information value is negative when there is no flexibility, and that it can also be negative when there is flexibility.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Emmanuelle Gabillon, 2011. "A theory of regret and information," Post-Print hal-00798216, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00798216
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Information with negative value
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2011-05-06 19:51:00

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00798216. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.