Ever since Sen’s (1993; 1997) criticism on the notion of internal consistency or menu independence of choice, there exists a widespread perception that the standard revealed preference approach to the theory of rational choice has difficulties in coping with the existence of external norms, or the information a menu of choice might convey to a decision-maker, viz., the epistemic value of a menu...

Starting from Amartya Sen’s works on rational behaviour, in this essay a contextually-embedded choice theory is presented. Using concepts and tools from poset mathematics, we show how to inject in rational choice theory cultural and social e¤ects. Speci…cally, we de…ne some choice super-structures seen as choice sets’ transformations imposed by accepted external consistency of choice requiremen...

Traditional environmental and resource economics uses rational choice theory to guide theevaluation of alternative policy options to correct market failure. Behavioral economics,however, has challenged this conventional mindset by showing how people frequently makechoices and state values that deviate from the presumption of rationality, i.e., behavioralfailures. This article ex...

Topics in Rational Choice Theory: Altruism, Consequentialism, and Identity by Sahar Zahida Akhtar Department of Philosophy Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Allen Buchanan, co-supervisor ___________________________ Alex Rosenberg, co-supervisor ___________________________ Jesse Prinz ___________________________ Susan Wolf ________________________...

Rational choice theory, a cornerstone of economic theory for more than a century, has been largely dismissed as having relevance to the study of political violence, especially when applied to individuals rather than to groups. Yet rational choice theory offers many benefits to policymakers attempting to prevent political violence: it can place political violence within a continuum that ranges f...

Despite the increasing popularity of IT-enabled personalization, the online consumers’ attitude of reactance appears to be a major inhibiting result in their acceptance of the online personalized advertising. The objective of this study is to study consumers’ reactance of online personalized advertising from the perspective of negative effects. Especially, we identify the rational choice factor...

This paper contributes to a theory of rational choice for decisionmakers with incomplete preferences due to partial ignorance, whose beliefs are representable as sets of acceptable priors. We focus on the limiting case of ‘Complete Ignorance’ which can be viewed as reduced form of the general case of partial ignorance. Rationality is conceptualized in terms of a ‘Principle of Preference-Basedne...

I consider a two-candidate plurality-rule election in which there is aggregate uncertainty about the popularity of each candidate, where voting is costly, and where participants are instrumentally motivated. The unique equilibrium predicts significant turnout under reasonable parameter configurations, and greater turnout for the underdog offsets the expected advantage of the perceived leader. I...