Shackle’s economic agent and modern decision theory

This paper assesses the rationale of George Shackle’s argument against Bayesian decision making in the light of recent developments of modern decision theory. The focus is on the so-called non-additive probability approach to decision theory under uncertainty, which, not unlike Shackle’s analysis, stresses the inability of agents to describe uncertain environments. A discussion of the pros and cons of the parallel between Shackle’s theory and the non-additive developments is provided.