A behavioral interpretation of belief functions
Probability
2017-03-27 v2
Abstract
Shafer's belief functions were introduced in the seventies of the previous century as a mathematical tool in order to model epistemic probability. One of the reasons that they were not picked up by mainstream probability was the lack of a behavioral interpretation. In this paper we provide such a behavioral interpretation, and re-derive Shafer's belief functions via a betting interpretation reminiscent of the classical Dutch Book Theorem for probability distributions. We relate our betting interpretation of belief functions to the existing literature.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1701.09142,
title = {A behavioral interpretation of belief functions},
author = {Timber Kerkvliet and Ronald Meester},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.09142},
year = {2017}
}