Coalescing,Event Commutativity,and Theories of Utility

Preferences satisfying rank-dependent utility exhibit three necessary properties: coalescing (forming the union of events having the same consequence), status-quo event commutativity, and rank-dependent additivity. The major result is that, under a few additional, relatively non-controversial, necessary conditions on binary gambles and assuming mappings are onto intervals, the converse is true. A number of other utility representations are checked for each of these three properties (see Table 2, Section 7).