For the last twenty-five years I have worked on understanding the behavioral underpinnings of environmental policy. My work has explored how institutions, incentives, and nature interact, with the goal of finding tools to help provide environmental protection at lower cost. The research revolves around a Rule of One: one rational person can move society toward predicted market equilibria; one i...

The mere act of choosing implies giving up possible alternatives and is therefore likely to generate a feeling of regret, which agents anticipate at the decision stage. In line with regret theory, I study the impact of anticipated regret on the decisionmaking process. The key feature of the model consists in considering biased regret anticipations. I thus describe the combined effect of cogniti...

Findings from behavioral organization theory, behavioral decision theory, survey research, and experimental economics leave no doubt about the failure of rational choice as a descriptive model of human behavior. But this does not mean that people and their politics are irrational. Bounded rationality asserts that decision makers are intendedly rational; that is, they are goaloriented and adapti...

1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The notion of the epistemic entrenchment has recently at t racted quite some attention in the AI community. It was introduced, first under the name "epistemic importance", by Peter G~irdenfors [7, 8]. He specified two possible "origins" of epistemic entrenchment: an information-theoretic appoach and a paradigm approach. However, neither of these approaches squares well...

In this paper the argument that the methodological tools offered by the Bounded Rationality Theory are better suited for the study of the decision-making by agents in social contexts than those offered by the Rational Choice Theory will be studied. Mainly the realistic characteristics of both theories will be established. It has been said, for instance, that the explanation of the individual de...

I feel in an awkward position presenting this paper to an inter-disciplinary audience. While economists have ignored caring as irrational behaviour, other disciplines have frequently considered the extent to which rationality and caring are disparate or compatible modes of thought, and until recently, have not tried to force caring into the specific mould of rational choice theory. In recent ye...

Affective decision-making (ADM) is a refutable and predictive theory of individual choice under risk and uncertainty. It generalizes expected utility theory by positing the existence of two cognitive processes – the “rational” and the “emotional” process. Observed choice is the result of their simultaneous interaction. We present a model of affective choice in insurance markets, where risk perc...

We present a method for evaluating the welfare of a decision maker, based on observed choice data. Unlike the standard economic theory of revealed preference, our method is can be used whether or not the observed choices are rational. Paralleling the standard theory we present a model for choice such that the observations arise "as if" they were the result of a speci…c decision making process. ...

This paper is on the rational choice theory and the choice of healthcare services for the treatment of malaria in Nigeria. It focuses on the factors that influence or determine the choice malaria treatment using the rational choice theory as the basis. It was discovered that there were many determinants of what informs the maximum utility but it is all wrapped up in the organization of the heal...