ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, we saw how the study of human decision making had progressed from the idea, introduced by Bernoulli in the 18th century, that we think about how much we value each option before us and trade this off against how likely it is to come about: utility combined with probability. Bernoulli realised that utility was not the same thing as wealth, an idea that is still with us, while the 20th century innovators of subjective expected utility theory, such as von Neumann and Morgenstern and Savage, detached utility from emotion in favour of pure preference. This latter idea has lessened its grip recently, in the face of renewed research on experienced utility, which can deliver decisions that fly in the face of what decision utility would predict.
