Maximin Safety: When Failing to Lose is Preferable to Trying to Win

Abstract

We present a new decision rule, \emph{maximin safety}, that seeks to maintain a large margin from the worst outcome, in much the same way minimax regret seeks to minimize distance from the best. We argue that maximin safety is valuable both descriptively and normatively. Descriptively, maximin safety explains the well-known \emph{decoy effect}, in which the introduction of a dominated option changes preferences among the other options. Normatively, we provide an axiomatization that characterizes preferences induced by maximin safety, and show that maximin safety shares much of the same behavioral basis with minimax regret.