Local and regional coherence utility assessment procedures

Summary Novick and Lindley (1978, 1979) have dealt with the use of utility functions for applications in education and have advocated the use of the standard gamble (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1953) elicitation procedure with the addition of coherence checking using overspecification and a least squares fit. In this procedure utilities are inferred from probability judgements offered by the assessor. This paper describes local and regional coherence procedures which seek utility coherence in successive restricted domains of the parameter space as preludes to overall coherence checking. These procedures and some others are viewed as possible ways of avoiding anchoring and certainty effect biases found in earlier fixed probability methods, and presumably present in current fixed state procedures.