Rationality and Context-Dependent Preferences PDF Download

Author: Prasanta K. Pattanaik
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
The standard theory of rational choice in economics considers an agent's choices to be rational if and only if the agent makes her choices in different choice situations on the basis of a fixed preference ordering defined over the set of all possible options. This implies that a rational agent's preferences cannot be context-dependent. This paper outlines a simple framework for defining context-dependence of preferences and for discussing relationships between context-dependent preferences and the notion of rationality.

Author: Thomas J. Steenburgh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This paper highlights a logical contradiction in the currently accepted theory of choice. This contradiction occurs when a decision is reframed by adding a clone to the choice set. The current theory concludes that individuals have context-dependent preferences if they make consistent choices; it concludes that individuals have rational preferences if they systematically switch from one alternative to another. I argue that these are not the logical conclusions to draw from the data and that the currently accepted theory should be revised. Rational decision making assumes that individuals make consistent decisions and leads to the similarity effect. Luce's IIA implies that adding a clone to the choice set makes an alternative more preferable, which is a framing effect.

Author: Ran Spiegler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199813426
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Conventional economic theory assumes that consumers are fully rational, that they have well-defined preferences and easily understand the market environment. Yet, in fact, consumers may have inconsistent, context-dependent preferences or simply not enough brain-power to evaluate and compare complicated products. Thus the standard model of consumer behavior-which depends on an ideal market in which consumers are boundlessly rational-is called into question. While behavioral economists have for some time confirmed and characterized these inconsistencies, the logical next step is to examine the implications they have in markets. Grounded in key observations in consumer psychology, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization develops non-standard models of "boundedly rational" consumer behavior and embeds them into familiar models of markets. It then rigorously analyses each model in the tradition of microeconomic theory, leading to a richer, more realistic picture of consumer behavior. Ran Spiegler analyses phenomena such as exploitative price plans in the credit market, complexity of financial products and other obfuscation practices, consumer antagonism to unexpected price increases, and the role of default options in consumer decision making. Spiegler unifies the relevant literature into three main strands: limited ability to anticipate and control future choices, limited ability to understand complex market environments, and sensitivity to reference points. Although the challenge of enriching the psychology of decision makers in economic models has been at the frontier of theoretical research in the last decade, there has been no graduate-level, theory-oriented textbook to cover developments in the last 10-15 years. Thus, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization offers a welcome and crucial new understanding of market behavior-it challenges conventional wisdom in ways that are interesting and economically significant, and which in the end effect the well-being of all market participants.

Author: Alistair Munro
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402094736
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book is about bounded rationality and public policy. It is written from the p- spective of someone trained in public economics who has encountered the enormous literature on experiments in decision-making and wonders what implications it has for the normative aspects of public policy. Though there are a few new results or models, to a large degree the book is synthetic in tone, bringing together disparate literatures and seeking some accommodation between them. It has had a long genesis. It began with a draft of a few chapters in 2000, but has expanded in scope and size as the literature on behavioural economics has grown. At some point I realised that the geometric growth of behavioural - search and the arithmetic growth of my writing were inconsistent with an am- tion to be exhaustive. As such therefore I have concentrated on particular areas of behavioural economics and bounded rationality. The resulting book is laid out as follows: Chapter 1 provides an overview of the rest of the book, goes through some basic de?nitions and identi?es themes.

Author: Ira Katznelson
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610443330
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
A scholarly gulf has tended to divide historians, political scientists, and social movement theorists on how people develop and act on their preferences. Rational choice scholars assumed that people—regardless of the time and place in which they live—try to achieve certain goals, like maximizing their personal wealth or power. In contrast, comparative historical scholars have emphasized historical context in explaining people's behavior. Recently, a common emphasis on how institutions—such as unions or governments—influence people's preferences in particular situations has emerged, promising to narrow the divide between the two intellectual camps. In Preferences and Situations, editors Ira Katnelson and Barry Weingast seek to expand that common ground by bringing together an esteemed group of contributors to address the ways in which institutions, in their wider historical setting, induce people to behave in certain ways and steer the course of history. The contributors examine a diverse group of topics to assess the role that institutions play in shaping people's preferences and decision-making. For example, Margaret Levi studies two labor unions to determine how organizational preferences are established. She discusses how the individual preferences of leaders crystallize and become cemented into an institutional culture through formal rules and informal communication. To explore how preferences alter with time, David Brady, John Ferejohn, and Jeremy Pope examine why civil rights legislation that failed to garner sufficient support in previous decades came to pass Congress in 1964. Ira Katznelson reaches back to the 13th century to discuss how the institutional development of Parliament after the signing of the Magna Carta led King Edward I to reframe the view of the British crown toward Jews and expel them in 1290. The essays in this book focus on preference formation and change, revealing a great deal of overlap between two schools of thought that were previously considered mutually exclusive. Though the scholarly debate over the merits of historical versus rational choice institutionalism will surely rage on, Preferences and Situations reveals how each field can be enriched by the other.

Author: Lara Buchak
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199672164
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Lara Buchak sets out a new account of rational decision-making in the face of risk. She argues that the orthodox view (expected utility theory) is too narrow, and suggests an alternative, more permissive theory: one that allows individuals to pay attention to the worst-case or best-case scenario, and vindicates the ordinary decision-maker.

Author: Paul Anand
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199290423
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
This volume provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare, but also to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.

Author: Nina Mazar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A central assumption of neoclassical economics is that reservation prices for familiar products express people's true preferences for these products, that is, they represent the total benefit that a good confers to the consumers, and are thus, independent of actual prices in the market. Nevertheless, a vast amount of research has shown that valuations can be sensitive to other salient prices; particularly when individuals are explicitly anchored on them. In this paper, the authors extend previous research on single-price anchoring and study the sensitivity of valuations to the distribution of prices found for the product in the market. In addition, they examine its possible causes. They find that market-dependent valuations cannot be fully explained by rational inferences consumers draw about a product's value, and are unlikely to be fully explained by true market-dependent preferences. Rather, the market dependence of valuations likely reflects consumers' focus on something other than the total benefit that the product confers to them. Furthermore, this paper shows that market-dependent valuations persist when - as in many real-life settings - individuals make repeated purchase decisions over time and infer the distribution of the product's prices from their market experience. Finally, the authors consider the implications of their findings for marketers and consumers. Former working paper title: "Price-Sensitive Preferences"

Author: Mark J. Machina
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475745923
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Beliefs, Interactions and Preferences in Decision Making mixes a selection of papers, presented at the Eighth Foundations and Applications of Utility and Risk Theory (`FUR VIII') conference in Mons, Belgium, together with a few solicited papers from well-known authors in the field. This book addresses some of the questions that have recently emerged in the research on decision-making and risk theory. In particular, authors have modeled more and more as interactions between the individual and the environment or between different individuals the emergence of beliefs as well as the specific type of information treatment traditionally called `rationality'. This book analyzes several cases of such an interaction and derives consequences for the future of decision theory and risk theory. In the last ten years, modeling beliefs has become a specific sub-field of decision making, particularly with respect to low probability events. Rational decision making has also been generalized in order to encompass, in new ways and in more general situations than it used to be fitted to, multiple dimensions in consequences. This book deals with some of the most conspicuous of these advances. It also addresses the difficult question to incorporate several of these recent advances simultaneously into one single decision model. And it offers perspectives about the future trends of modeling such complex decision questions. The volume is organized in three main blocks: The first block is the more `traditional' one. It deals with new extensions of the existing theory, as is always demanded by scientists in the field. A second block handles specific elements in the development of interactions between individuals and their environment, as defined in the most general sense. The last block confronts real-world problems in both financial and non-financial markets and decisions, and tries to show what kind of contributions can be brought to them by the type of research reported on here.

Author: Fuad Aleskerov
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3662049929
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The utility maximization paradigm forms the basis of many economic, psychological, cognitive and behavioral models. However, numerous examples have revealed the deficiencies of the concept. This book helps to overcome those deficiencies by taking into account insensitivity of measurement threshold and context of choice. The second edition has been updated to include the most recent developments and a new chapter on classic and new results for infinite sets.