In honor of today's Schelling-pointmas, a true Schelling-inspired story from a class I was in at a law school I did not attend:
As always, the class was dead silent as we walked to the front of the room. The professor only described the game after the participants had volunteered and been chosen; as a result, we rarely were familiar with the games we were playing, which the professor preferred because his money was on the line.
Both of us were assigned different groups of seven partners in the class. I was given seven slips of paper and my opponent was given six. Our goal was to make deals with our partners about how... (read 324 more words →)
VNM utility is a necessary consequence of its axioms but doesn't entail a unique utility function; as such, the ability to prevent Dutch Books is derived more from VNM's assumption of a fixed total ordering of outcomes than anything.