Cautiousness when experts disagree

Abstract

Experts often disagree. A decision-maker may want to be cautious and prefer alternatives that have expert consensus over those that do not. Existing models of decision making under expert disagreement rest on ambiguity-averse preferences adopting a unanimity principle: If all experts consider one choice better than another, so should the decision-maker. Such unanimity among experts, however, can be spurious, masking substantial disagreement on the underlying reasons. We introduce a novel notion of cautiousness to distinguish spurious from genuine unanimity and develop a model that can capture cautiousness in our sense. The central element of our model is the cautious aggregation of experts’ beliefs.