A decision theory for partially consonant belief functions

Partially consonant belief functions (pcb), studied by Walley, are the only class of Dempster-Shafer belief functions that are consistent with the likelihood principle of statistics. Structurally, the set of foci of a pcb is partitioned into non-overlapping groups and within each group, foci are nested. The pcb class includes both probability function and Zadeh's possibility function as special cases. This paper studies decision making under uncertainty described by pcb. We prove a representation theorem for preference relation over pcb lotteries to satisfy an axiomatic system that is similar in spirit to von Neumann and Morgenstern's axioms of the linear utility theory. The closed-form expression of utility of a pcb lottery is a combination of linear utility for probabilistic lottery and two-component (binary) utility for possibilistic lottery. In our model, the uncertainty information, risk attitude and ambiguity attitude are separately represented. A tractable technique to extract ambiguity attitude from a decision maker behavior is also discussed. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.