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Expected Utility, Ordering, and Context Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Piers Rawling
Piers Rawling
Affiliation:
University of Missouri–St. Louis
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Extract

The context-free weak ordering principle (that rational preferences are weakly ordered, and that subtracting members from the domain of alternatives does not alter the ordering of the original domain, see, for example, Savage, 1972, pp. 205–6; McClennen, 1990, pp. 29–30) is viewed by many as a cornerstone of rational choice theory. McClennen, for example, claims (1990, p. 1) that this principle is one of a pair on which '[t]he theory of rational choice and preference, as it has been developed in the past few decades by economists and decision theorists, rests', and Sen (1970, p. 17) characterizes a version of context freedom (the ‘independence of irrelevant alternatives’, or ‘property α’) as ‘a very basic requirement of rational choice’. But this principle is certainly not uncontroversial: there are examples of (putative) principle is certainly not apper irrational.

Type
Essays
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 79 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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