Consumer theory is concerned with how a rational consumer would make consumption decisions. What makes this problem worthy of separate study, apart from the general problem of choice theory, is its particular structure that allows us to derive economically meaningful results. The structure arises because the consumer’s choice sets sets are assumed to be defined by certain prices and the consume...

Is it rational to be mindful? Can one be more or less rationally mindful? Can one be more or less mindfully rational? In this short article I explore the contribution that mindfulness can make to modeling and theorizing about rationality—including rational choice and rational belief, or ‘epistemic rationality’. The two streams of literature have in fact never met—a sign of the self-defeating is...

The paper analyses modelling renewal of construction objects applying methods of the game theory. Rational construction management variants are usually selected under various conditions, using the efficiency criteria. A choice of rational alternatives can be absolutely uncertain when influences of external factors are unknown. In the current paper, selecting of rational renewal variants of dere...

I WANT TO FOCUS ON A SINGLE WORK OF LITERATURE. It is not directly concerned with war among states, though its author, Choderlos de Laclos, was in fact a soldier, an artillery officer, and an expert in fortifications. It deals with other kinds of war. My goal today is to consider the place of reason—of rational choice in the commonsense version of this term—and, specifically, of rational choice...

INTRODUCTION THE INTERPRETATION OF TEXTS AND OF BEHAVIOR is closely related to the rational choice explanation of action. In this article I try to bring out two aspects of that connection. I first ask whether we can enhance our understanding of a literary text by assuming the rationality of its creator. In novels, for instance, things often happen “for a reason”—be it a reason for the author, f...

Employee violations of IS security policies are reported as a key concern for organizations. Although behavioral research on IS security has received increasing attention from IS scholars, little empirical research has examined this problem. To address this research gap, the authors test a model based on Rational Choice Theory (RCT)—a prominent criminological theory not yet applied in IS—which ...

Rational choice and hermeneutics seem at odds, but the tension can be fruitfully resolved. The conflict between them closely mirrors the earlier conflict between historicism and positivism. In interwar Vienna, an influential group of social scientists tried to combine the best elements of both approaches. Rational choice was united with Verstehen and the method of ideal types, as evidenced by t...

The SAGE Library of Political Science collects together the articles that have been most influential in shaping the discipline. Each multi-volume set presents a collection of field-defining published works, both classical and contemporary, sourced from the foremost publications in the discipline by an internationally renowned editor or editorial team. They also include a full introduction, pres...

These are exciting times for those interested in the connection of biology to behavior. Consider the following findings that were reported in the first half of 2005 alone. Sexual foreplay for fruit flies is fairly predictable. A male first approaches a waiting female, bumps or taps her with his leg, rubs his wings in such a way as to make music, and then begins to lick her. The remarkable recen...