A model to support the assessment of subjective probabilities

Conclusions The purpose of this article has been to provide a new method for the determination of subjective probabilities. The kind of support which is suggested for the assessment process has several interesting properties. Constructed in accordance with the Savage theory the procedure considers a preference structure on the space of the possible actions A or on a suitably chosen space A ^* as its basis. This structure will be attained by pairwise comparison of the elements a _i A (or a _i ^*A ^*). It may be incomplete and inconsistent. A linear programming approach will use this information to derive numerical probabilities which are in accordance with the stated preference judgments. Therefore, it avoids the difficulties which arise when the judge has to assign the numerical values to the possible states of nature. On the other hand, this method presents the advantage of taking into consideration all relevant a priori information because of its systematic judgment process. Another important element is given by the use of coefficients which express the judge's confidence in the stated comparisons. Further relevance is added to the procedure by the relatively small consumption of time and work to report the judgments even in complex situations, and by the renunciation of any methodological knowledge on the part of the judges.This study was financed by a research grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).