Anticipatory feelings may generate ambiguity averse preferences

Abstract

We consider the impact of anticipatory feelings on behavior. We focus on a very simple type of anticipatory feelings: we assume that anticipatory feelings are based on future expected utility. Although this modeling may not reflect the complexity of anticipatory emotions, it has an interesting consequence: We show that when there are diminishing returns in anticipatory feelings and additive separability, individual preferences are formally similar to ambiguity-averse preferences à la Klibanoff, Marinacci and Mukerji (2005), under uncertainty. This particularly applies to situations in which utility is by nature anticipatory, as for parents who care for the future welfare of their children, after their own death. The analysis can explain patters of behavior for large long-term environmental risks.

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