EXPECTED UTILITY WITHOUT UTILITY

This paper advances an interpretation of Von Neumann-Morgenstern's exp ected utility model for preferences over lotteries which does not requ ire the notion of a cardinal utility over prizes and can be phrased en tirely in the language of probability. According to it, the expected u tility of a lottery can be read as the probability that this lottery o utperforms another given independent lottery. The implications of this interpretation for some topics and models in decision theory are cons idered.