A survey of the theory of coherent lower previsions

This paper presents a summary of Peter Walley's theory of coherent lower previsions. We introduce three representations of coherent assessments: coherent lower and upper previsions, closed and convex sets of linear previsions, and sets of desirable gambles. We show also how the notion of coherence can be used to update our beliefs with new information, and a number of possibilities to model the notion of independence with coherent lower previsions. Next, we comment on the connection with other approaches in the literature: de Finetti's and Williams' earlier work, Kuznetsov's and Weischelberger's work on interval-valued probabilities, Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and Shafer and Vovk's game-theoretic approach. Finally, we present a brief survey of some applications and summarize the main strengths and challenges of the theory. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.