Before revision:  In this paper I show that, under certain assumptions , stochastic dominance reasoning can capture many of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding its implausible implications. More specifically, when an agent starts from a condition of background uncertainty about the choiceworthiness of her optionsrepresentable by a probability distribution over possible degrees of choiceworthiness with exponential or heavier tails and a sufficiently large scale parameter , many expectation-maximizing gambles that would not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" turn out to do so in virtue of that background uncertainty.
After revision:  In this paper I show that, under certain assumptions , stochastic dominance reasoning can capture many of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty about the choiceworthiness of her optionsrepresentable by a probability distribution over possible degrees of choiceworthiness with exponential or heavier tails and a sufficiently large scale parameter , many expectation-maximizing gambles that would not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" turn out to do so in virtue of that background uncertainty.