Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/305466 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 362
Publisher: 
University of California, Department of Economics, Davis, CA
Abstract: 
We consider a decision maker who is unaware of objects to be sampled and thus cannot form beliefs about the occurrence of particular objects. Ex ante she can form beliefs about the occurrence of novelty and the frequencies of yet to be known objects. Conditional on any sampled objects, she can also form beliefs about the next object being novel or being one of the previously sampled objects. We characterize behaviorally such beliefs under subjective expected utility. In doing so, we relate "reverse" Bayesianism, a central property in the literature on decision making under growing awareness, with exchangeable random partitions, the central property in the literature on the discovery of species problem and mutations in statistics, combinatorial probability theory, and population genetics. Partition exchangeable beliefs do not necessarily satisfy "reverse" Bayesianism. Yet, the most prominent models of exchangeable random partitions, the model by De Morgan (1838), the one parameter model of Ewens (1972), and the two parameter model of Pitman (1995) and Zabell (1997), do satisfy "reverse" Bayesianism.
Subjects: 
Awareness of unawareness
unknown unknowns
exchangeable random partitions
"reverse" Bayesianism
discovery of species problem
discovery
novelty
inductive reasoning
JEL: 
D83
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.