Consequentialist Foundations for Expected Utility

Behaviour norms are considered for decision trees which allow both objective probabilities and uncertain states of the world with unknown probabilities. Terminal nodes have consequences in a given domain. Behaviour is required to be consistent in subtrees. Consequentialist behaviour, by definition, reveals a consequence choice function independent of the structure of the decision tree. It implies that behaviour reveals a revealed preference ordering satisfying both the independence axiom and a novel form of surething principle. Continuous consequentialist behaviour must be expected utility maximizing. Other familiar assumptions then imply additive utilities, subjective probabilities, and Bayes’ rule.