Affiliation:
1. London School of Economics, UK and University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
2. London School of Economics, UK,
Abstract
According to standard rational choice theory, as commonly used in political science and economics, an agent’s fundamental preferences are exogenously fixed, and any preference change over decision options is due to Bayesian information learning. Although elegant and parsimonious, such a model fails to account for preference change driven by experiences or psychological changes distinct from information learning. We develop a model of non-informational preference change. Alternatives are modelled as points in some multidimensional space, only some of whose dimensions play a role in shaping the agent’s preferences. Any change in these ‘motivationally salient’ dimensions can change the agent’s preferences. How it does so is described by a new representation theorem. Our model not only captures a wide range of frequently observed phenomena, but also generalizes some standard representations of preferences in political science and economics.
Subject
Sociology and Political Science
Reference36 articles.
1. Accounting for Tastes
2. Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment
3. Issue Evolution
4. Debreu G. ( 1959) Topological methods in cardinal utility theory. In Arrow KJ, Karlin S and Suppes P (eds) Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 16-26.
Cited by
25 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献