The classical theory of rational choice is built on several important internal consistency conditions. In recent years, the reasonableness of those internal consistency conditions has been questioned and criticized, and several responses to accommodate such criticisms have been proposed in the literature. This paper develops a general framework to accommodate the issues raised by the criticisms...

Conditions α and β are two well-known rationality conditions in the theory of rational choice. This paper examines the implications of weaker versions of these two rationality conditions in the context of solutions to nonconvex bargaining problems. It is shown that, together with the standard axioms of efficiency and strict individual rationality, they imply rationalizability of solutions to no...

The principal-agent problem is fundamental to organization design. A principal must negotiate an incentive contract to motivate a more risk averse agent to undertake costly actions that cannot be observed. In rational choice theory, the problem is solved through an inefficient shifting of risk from principal to agent. However neither field studies nor prior experiments have observed the types o...

Recent International Relations scholarship offers valuable rational choice explanations for the design of international institutions. However, the rational design literature has relied heavily on institutional outcomes as evidence for testing models. Such studies must be complemented by research designs that analyze the decisions and bargaining that drive design choices in order to expose causa...

According to rational choice theory, beneficial preferences should lead individuals to sort available options into linear, transitive hierarchies, although the extent to which non-human animals behave rationally is unclear. Here we demonstrate that mate choice in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster results in the linear sorting of a set of diverse isogenic female lines, unambiguously demonstr...

In order to vindicate rational-choice theory as a mode of explaining social patterns in general – social patterns beyond the narrow range of economic behaviour – we have to recognize the legitimacy of explaining the resilience of certain patterns of behaviour: that is, explaining, not necessarily why they emerged or have been sustained, but why they are robust and reliable. And once we allow th...

Rational choice theory says that operators and others make decisions by systematically and consciously weighing all possible outcomes along all relevant criteria. This paper first traces the long historical arm of rational choice thinking in the West to Judeo-Christian thinking, Calvin and Weber. It then presents a case study that illustrates the consequences of the ethic of rational choice and...

We propose a new theory of choice between lotteries, which combines an ‘economic’ view of decision making based on a rational, though incomplete, ordering with a ’psychological’ view based on heuristics. This theory can explain observed violations of EU theory, namely all cyclical patterns of choice as well as violations of independence.

1. Introduction Over the last 50 years, the theory of rational choice has emerged as the dominant paradigm of quantitative research in the social and economic sciences. The idea that individuals make choices by rationally weighing values and uncertainties (or that they ought to, or at least act as if they do) is central to Bayesian methods of statistical inference and decision analysis; the the...