Christoph Fehige and Ulla Wessels (eds), Preferences

Introduction to Formal Philosophy, 2018

Preferences and choices have central roles in moral philosophy, economics, and the decision sciences in general. In a formal language we can express and explore the properties of preferences, choices, and their interrelations in a precise way, and uncover connections that are inaccessible without formal tools. In this chapter, the plausibility of different such properties is discussed, and it is shown how close attention to the logical details can help dissolve some apparent paradoxes in informal and semi-formal treatments.

Synthese, 2010

Preference is a key area where analytic philosophy meets philosophical logic. I start with two related issues: reasons for preference, and changes in preference, first mentioned in von Wright's book The Logic of Preference but not thoroughly explored there. I show how these two issues can be handled together in one dynamic logical framework, working with structured two-level models, and we investigate the resulting dynamics of reason-based preference in some detail. Next, we study the foundational issue of entanglement between preference and beliefs, and relate the resulting richer logics to belief revision theory and decision theory.

Preferences. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 1998

Theories of rational decision normally distinguish basic and other preferences, using only the former for calculating the utility function of an agent. The idea behind the distinction is that, on the one hand, a theory of rational decision must allow criticism of at least a part of the agent's actual preferences; on the other hand, so as not to lose touch with the agent's real interests, it must rely on his factual preferences. Different decision theories have declared as basic various sets of preferences, thereby arriving at very different utility functions. Therefore, the question of which preferences shall be basic is of large practical importance. Nonetheless, it has rarely been discussed.

2010

Abstract Preference is a key area where analytic philosophy meets philosophical logic. I start with two related issues: reasons for preference, and changes in preference, first mentioned in von Wright's book The Logic of Preference but not thoroughly explored there. I show how these two issues can be handled together in one dynamic logical framework, working with structured two-level models, and I investigate the resulting dynamics of reason-based preference in some detail.

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2020

In the philosophy of economics, the last fifteen years have witnessed an intense discussion about the epistemological status of economic models of decision making and their theoretical components, such as the concept of preference. In this article I offer a selective review of this discussion and indicate the directions in which I believe it should evolve.

Crítica (México D. F. En línea)

Philosophy of Science, 2001

2010

This dissertation addresses a basic difficulty in accommodating other-regarding preferences within existing models of decision making. Decision makers with such preferences may violate the property of stochastic dominance that is shared by both expected utility and almost any model of non-expected utility. At its core, stochastic dominance requires a decision maker's behavior to conform to a basic form of consequentialism, namely, that her ranking of outcomes should be independent of the stochastic process that generates these outcomes. On the other hand, decision makers with other-regarding preferences may show a concern for procedures; that is they may care not just about what the outcomes of others are but also about how these outcomes are generated and therefore their ranking of outcomes may be intrinsically dependent on the outcome-generating process. We provide theoretical foundations for a new representation of other-regarding preferences that accommodates concerns for procedure and possible violations of stochastic dominance. Our axioms provide a sharp characterization of how a decision maker's ranking of outcomes depends on the procedure by expressing `payoffs' as a weighted average of her concerns for outcomes, and her concerns for procedure. The weight used in evaluating this weighted average, which we call the procedural weight, is uniquely determined and quantifies the relative importance of procedural concerns. In the special case in which procedural concerns are absent our baseline decision model reduces to expected utility, and our most parsimonious representation is one parameter richer than that model. We use our decision model to provide an expressive theory of voting.

2018

OF THE DISSERTATION Three Essays in the Theory of Preferences by SEYED HASSAN NOSRATABADI Dissertation Director: Oriol Carbonell-Nicolau This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter addresses the classical questions of utility representation and maximization. It relaxes the notion of weak upper continuity (Campbell and Walker (1990)) to obtain a property called partial weak upper continuity and shows that both maximization of preferences and representation by a utility function can be achieved under this new property. The rest of this dissertation focuses on extending revealed preference theory to accommodate behavioral anomalies observed in the experimental data. In particular, I offer a framework to expand the theory of revealed preferences to the case where a DM’s choice is not completely identified with a single preferences. In Chapter 2, I use a divide and conquer procedure in order to expand the revealed preference theory to accommodate behavioral anomalies ...