Consequentialism, Structural Rationality, and Game Theory
نویسنده
چکیده
Previous work on consequentialism (especially in Theory and Decision, 1988, pp. 25– 78) has provided some justification for regarding an agent’s behaviour as “structurally rational” if and only if there are subjective probabilities, and expected utility is maximized. The key axiom is that rational behaviour should be explicable as the choice of good consequences. This and other axioms will be re-assessed critically, together with their logical implications. Their applicability to behaviour in n-person games will also be discussed. The paper concludes with some discussion of modelling bounded rationality. I. THREE CONSEQUENTIALIST AXIOMS In the little space and brief time allowed to me, I shall try to impart some of the key ideas of the “consequentialist” approach to rational behaviour. At the same time, I shall try to assess its significance and to explain its limitations. Consequentialism relies on the presumption that behaviour is rational if and only if it is explicable by its consequences. More specifically, the set of consequences which can result from behaviour should depend only on the set of feasible consequences. And, as the key assumption, this should be true for an (almost) unrestricted domain of finite decision trees whose terminal nodes have specified consequences.
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تاریخ انتشار 2001