Risk, rationality and expected utility theory

There are decision problems where the preferences that seem rational to many people cannot be accommodated within orthodox decision theory in the natural way. In response, a number of alternatives to the orthodoxy have been proposed. In this paper, I offer an argument against those alternatives and in favour of the orthodoxy. I focus on preferences that seem to encode sensitivity to risk. And I focus on the alternative to the orthodoxy proposed by Lara Buchaks risk-weighted expected utility theory. I will show that the orthodoxy can be made to accommodate all of the preferences that Buchaks theory can accommodate.