Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Conditions on orderings and acceptable-set functions
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and sketch of the main argument
- 2 The ordering principle
- 3 The independence principle
- 4 The problem of justification
- 5 Pragmatic arguments
- 6 Dynamic choice problems
- 7 Rationality conditions on dynamic choice
- 8 Consequentialist constructions
- 9 Reinterpreting dynamic consistency
- 10 A critique of the pragmatic arguments
- 11 Formalizing a pragmatic perspective
- 12 The feasibility of resolute choice
- 13 Connections
- 14 Conclusions
- 15 Postscript: projections
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
1 - Introduction and sketch of the main argument
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Conditions on orderings and acceptable-set functions
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and sketch of the main argument
- 2 The ordering principle
- 3 The independence principle
- 4 The problem of justification
- 5 Pragmatic arguments
- 6 Dynamic choice problems
- 7 Rationality conditions on dynamic choice
- 8 Consequentialist constructions
- 9 Reinterpreting dynamic consistency
- 10 A critique of the pragmatic arguments
- 11 Formalizing a pragmatic perspective
- 12 The feasibility of resolute choice
- 13 Connections
- 14 Conclusions
- 15 Postscript: projections
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Two principles of rationality
The theory of rational choice and preference, as it has been developed in the past few decades by economists and decision theorists, rests on a pair of principles. The first, the weak ordering principle (WO), as it is usually formulated, takes rational choice to consist in the maximization of a weak preference ordering defined over the set of feasible alternatives. Adopting the usual terminology of speaking of x as weakly preferred to y when x is either (strictly) preferred to y or x and y are indifferent, a preference relation weakly orders a feasible set X just in case it is (1) connected – if x and y are any two alternatives in X, then either x is weakly preferred to y or y is weakly preferred to x (possibly both), and (2) fully transitive – for any three alternatives x, y, and z in X, if x is weakly preferred to y, and y is weakly preferred to z, then x is weakly preferred to z. Correspondingly, choice can be said to maximize such an ordering on X when the alternative x chosen satisfies the condition that there be no other alternative y in X such that y is (strictly) preferred to x. As it turns out, however, there is a quite distinct condition that is also presupposed – albeit usually only implicitly – in the weak ordering principle, namely, that the ordering is context free.
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- Rationality and Dynamic ChoiceFoundational Explorations, pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990