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...

This chapter extends Anderson’s (1990) rational analysis of problem solving to a class of exploratory search situations that involve selecting one of a number of possible options, where little is known about the options before exploration begins. We formulate the situation as one of single-move, multi-stage search, where the probabilities of success of the different options are initially unknow...

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...

the rational cubic function with three parameters has been extended to rational bi-cubic function to visualize the shape of regular convex surface data. the rational bi-cubic function involves six parameters in each rectangular patch. data dependent constraints are derived on four of these parameters to visualize the shape of convex surface data while other two are free to refine the shape of s...

The past decade has witnessed a growing controversy over the status of formal approaches in political science, and especially the growing prominence of formal rational choice theory. Rational choice models have been an accepted part of the academic study of politics since the 1950s, but their popularity has grown signiacantly in recent years.1 Elite academic departments are now expected to incl...