Abstract A standard interpretation of the character Hamlet is that he indecisive, even pathologically so, and his indecisiveness manifested by lengthy passage time between when told father’s death was a murder kills perpetrator. Rational choice in economics concerns connection means ends. person rational if, given her ends (her goals), she chooses reasonable to achieve those With uncertainty, b...

The literature exploring other regarding behavior sheds important light on interesting social phenomena, yet less attention has been given to how the received results speak to foundational assumptions within economics. Our study synthesizes the empirical evidence, showing that recent work challenges convex preference theory but is largely consistent with rational choice theory. Guided by this u...

The main purpose of rational choice theory is to lay out in clear and transparent terms what conditions are necessary and/or sufficient for the validity of statements about consistent human behavior. Strong criteria for rationality are ‘wrong’ if understood as a positive description. However, their very strength provides a sharp guide for experimental social science’s project of mapping the pro...

The aim of this paper is to offer some philosophical reflections on the use of rational choice theory within evolutionary biology. Since the 1960s, concepts and models from rational choice theory have often utilized by biologists, usually with some modifications, to shed light on evolutionary phenomena. This is particularly true in behavioural ecology – the science that studies animal behaviour...

A classic issue in the theory of rational choice is whether individuals’ preferences should and can be measured. This paper suggests that studies of altruistic behavior will benefit from trying to measure altruistic preferences. Such an effort would enable scholars to test the separate effect of preferences and situational factors on action. The above suggestions are applied to the case of the ...

We study and test a class of boundedly rational models of decision making which rely on sequential eliminative heuristics. We formalize two sequential decision procedures, both inspired by plausible models popular among several psychologists and marketing scientists. However we follow a standard ‘revealed preference’ economic approach by fully characterizing these procedures by few, simple and ...

Rational Choice Theory (RCT) is, without question, one of the most important accounts of how we make decisions; despite this, though, its plausibility has been vigorously debated over many years. A recent innovation in this debate has been to appeal to evolutionary theory: both defenders and critics of RCT have come to build their positions in essential ways on evolutionary biological considera...

Game and decision theory start from rather strong premises. Preferences, represented by utilities, beliefs represented by probabilities, common knowledge and symmetric rationality as background assumptions are treated as “given.” A richer language enabling us to capture the process leading to what is “given” seems superior to the stenography of decision making in terms of utility cum probabilit...

This paper examines behavioral economics’ use of the positive-normative distinction in its critique of standard rational choice theory as normative, and argues that it departs from Robbins’ understanding of that distinction in ways that suggest behavioral economists themselves do not observe that distinction. One implication of this is that behavioral economists generally do not recognize Putna...