Expected qualitative utility maximization (Q5938621)

The author presents a new axiomatic of individual preferences for decision making under risk that is an alternative to the classical Neumann-Morgenstern (NM) one. It is destined for situations when each of compared lotteries consists of two situations and one of them is overwhelmingly preferable to another. If the main situations of lotteries are deemed as equal, the alternatives will be judged as equal even if they are mixed with different overwhelmed (insignificant) effects which are not be judged as equal ones. This contradicts the NM independence axiom. Another contradiction concerns to the NM continuity axiom. The main notion of the new theory is a qualitative order on nonstandard models of the real numbers which is represented by ``nonstandard utilities''. Probabilities of lotteries are standard numbers and subjective ones. The main result of the paper is a theorem of the representation of the qualitative order by a linear nonstandard utility function. Comparison with the lexicographic subjective expected utility theory is done.