I HAD BETTER BEGIN BY CONFESSING that I am not an enthusiast for rational choice theory (hereafter RCT). It is not uncommon for devotees of RCT to suggest that it provides a quite general tool for understanding human behaviour, and should largely supersede traditional historical, cultural, and related theoretical approaches. While I am happy to acknowledge that RCT may provide a useful set of t...

This article presents a “second-generation” rational choice explanation for voluntary regional governance. It identifies the interests that motivate interlocal collaboration and argues that voluntary agreements emerge from a dynamic political contracting process in which benefits exceed the transaction costs of bargaining an agreement. Explanations are presented for how specific community chara...

The theory of rational choice assumes that when people make decisions they do so in order to maximize their utility. In order to achieve this goal they ought to use all the information available and consider all the choices available to choose an optimal choice. This paper investigates what happens when decisions are made by artificially intelligent machines in the market rather than human bein...

It is well-known that usual doxastic models (epistemic logic, probability) suffer from strong idealizations. By extension, models of decision making that elaborate on these doxastic models (e.g., models of choice under set-theoretic uncertainty ([LR85], chap.13) and the expected utility model) inherit these idealizations. To improve doxastic models is therefore an important aspect of bounded ra...

Some philosophers believe that two objects of value can be ‘roughly equal’, or ‘on a par’, or belong to the same ‘clump’ of value in a sense that is fundamentally different from that in which some objects are ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, or ‘equally as good as’ others. This article shows that if two objects are on a par, or belong to the same clump, then an agent accepting a few plausible premi...

As stated elsewhere in this issue, we cannot claim to explain an institution’s origin just by the functions it serves. In part this may be because of the cognitive limitations of those actors who are instrumental in institutional formation and institutional change. But even more clearly, it is the case that rational instrumental choice does not imply functional institutions. Just as rational ch...