A Dutch book against sleeping beauties who are evidential decision theorists

Vincent Conitzer

pp. 2887-2899

in: Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (ed), The roles of experience in a priori knowledge, Synthese 192 (9), 2015.

Abstract

In the context of the Sleeping Beauty problem, it has been argued that so-called “halfers” can avoid Dutch book arguments by adopting evidential decision theory. I introduce a Dutch book for a variant of the Sleeping Beauty problem and argue that evidential decision theorists fall prey to it, whether they are halfers or thirders. The argument crucially requires that an action can provide evidence for what the agent would do not only at other decision points where she has exactly the same information, but also at decision points where she has different but “symmetric” information.