Minimax regret with imperfect ex-post knowledge of the state

Abstract

We consider decision problems under complete ignorance and extend the minimax regret principle to situations where, after taking an action, the decision maker does not necessarily learn the state of the world. For example, if the decision maker only learns what the outcome is, then all she knows is that the actual state is one of the (possibly several) states that yield the observed outcome under the chosen action. We refer to this situation as imperfect ex-post information. We show that, given a choice between more information and less information, the decision maker prefers the latter. We also extend the framework to encompass the possibility of less than the extreme degree of pessimism that characterizes the minimax regret criterion.