Purity, Resistance, and Innocence in Utility Theory

This note addresses 3 issues that seem to pervade much of economic thought about individual decisions among uncertain alternatives: (1) Restricting primitives to just orderings of first-order gambles and not admitting, e.g., compound acts or joint receipt of consequences and gambles. (2) Great resistance to experimental findings that strongly suggest that most current theories fail descriptively. (3) Taking for granted the innocence of some assumptions when, in fact, they are not innocent, e.g., that constant acts are idempotent. My conclusion is that these restrictions have greatly inhibited developments in utility theory.