Transferable belief model, Pignistic probability, pseudo-science? I have to review an article for a conference. This article deals with Transferable belief model and Pignistic probability, concepts that were previously unknown to me (CS background). 
I dived into thes "theories" and all this came to me as a complete pseudo-science with very unclear concepts, out-of-the blue definitions and overly complexed vocabularies. Reading the wikipedia talk pages on Transferable belief model and Dempster–Shafer_theory conforted my opinion. Plus the fact that these articles are noted as of low importance.
However, I'm no expert in statistics and decision theory so I ask the community if these theories are backed by a rigorous background and if they have a proven track-record of applications and reproducible results ? As a researcher, I won't be convinced by a high number of citations of research articles.
 A: Imagine you have a stock whose value at time 0 is $S_0$ and at time 1 can take one of two possible values, $S_1\in\{a,b\}$ (corresponding to up-tick and down-tick in the price). Now you also have another financial security $V_1$ that depends on the value $S_1$ (for example, a call option). Since any two points determine a straight line, $V_1$ is a linear function of $S_1$. This allows us to find $V_0$, the price of the security at time 0, from $S_0$ using the linearity of pricing (the price of two cars is $2$ $\times$ the price of one car).
This is known as risk-neutral pricing and is a central part of mathematical finance.
Now suppose that $S_1\in\{a,b,c\}$ (three possible values) instead. Then the above type of argument only gives an interval for $V_0$, rather than an exact value. 
While I don't know for sure, it seems that the theory of belief functions in Dempster-Shafer theory is related to this -- so we have some belief in a proposition $p$ without assigning an exact Bayesian probability to $p$. Here $V_0$ could be equal to 1 if $p$ is true and 0 otherwise.
In conclusion, this is certainly not pseudo-science, but seems like a useful way of organizing inconclusive evidence.
