Preference-Based Unawareness
This work addresses theoretical gaps in modeling unawareness for decision-makers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks.
The paper extends preference-based definitions of knowledge and belief to unawareness structures, showing equivalence between behavioral characterizations and epistemic notions to bridge decision theory and epistemic logic.
Morris (1996, 1997) introduced preference-based definitions of knowledge and belief in standard state-space structures. This paper extends this preference-based approach to unawareness structures (Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper, 2006, 2008). By defining unawareness and knowledge in terms of preferences over acts in unawareness structures and showing their equivalence to the epistemic notions of unawareness and knowledge, we try to build a bridge between decision theory and epistemic logic. Unawareness of an event is characterized behaviorally as the event being null and its negation being null.