That is, not just that the different utilities the agent is seeking are independent or even conflicting but that there is no meaningful mapping from these different utilities to a single utility function, even a single ordinal utility ranking. In other words that the utilities may be of fundamentally different kinds so that any mapping to a single measure could only be made by losing the essent...

Recently proposed models of risky choice imply systematic violations of transitivity of preference. This study explored whether people show the predicted intransitivity of the two models proposed to account for the certainty effect in Allais paradoxes. In order to distinguish “true” violations from those produced by “error,” a model was fit in which each choice can have a different error rate a...

This paper tries to contribute to the well-known and lengthy discussion on whether we should allow decision makers to be inconsistent, or, to put it in another way, if intransitive decisions better represent their preferences. We will focus specifically on the multiple-criteria decision making problem, since it is one of the most usual stances where this intransitivity appears. Result from an e...

There is a common belief that humans and many animals follow transitive inference (choosing A over C on the basis of knowing that A is better than B and B is better than C). Transitivity seems to be the essence of rational choice. We present a theoretical model of a repeated game in which the players make a choice between three goods (e.g. food). The rules of the game refer to the simple proced...

"The flows predicted by a large class of spatial interaction models are transitive, yet US migration tables have been shown to contain large numbers of intransitivities. This paper investigates a number of possible conditions under which flows regulated by the spatial interaction model might be observed to be intransitive. A singly constrained gravity model is calibrated for a number of flow ta...

In the experiment we proof the paradoxical perception of pitch. A tone sequence demonstrates this paradox: the sequence is perceived as descending, although the first and last tone are identical. The intransitivity of pitch perception generalizes (Shepard 1964). It applies also to harmonic complex tones with variate amplitude envelope and partials that are arranged in intervals different from o...

A set of arguments shows that either the Repugnant Conclusion and its variants are true or the better-than relation isn't transitive. Which is it? This is the most important question in population ethics. The answer will point the way to Parfit's elusive Theory X. In many ways, Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons is the natural successor to Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick's book...