A More General System of Axioms for Cardinal Utility

Abstract

As has been stated in Section 5 of Chapter 2, it is a fact of experience that the decision-maker will have to face, in general, choice situations that cannot be considered, even in an approximate way, identical repetitions of a single choice situation. From one choice situation to another the decision-maker’s preference ordering may change, or if his preference ordering remains the same the strength of his preferences may change, or the set of available actions may not be the same,¹ etc. Therefore, we need to extend the system of axioms presented in Chapter 4, to deal with the case of a single choice situation, to cover the more general case where different choice situations are considered.