Abstract
A person acts rationally if her actions appear to make sense with respect to the person’s aims. Actions make sense with respect to a person’s aims if they seem to be appropriate means for achieving those aims.
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Reference
See Ramsey (1931) and Savage (1954).
See Wiesenthal in Elster (1983).
See Elster (1979, 1983).
See Tversky/Kahnemann (1984).
See Luce/Raiffa (1957), ch. 2.
For a still good introduction see Luce/Raiffa (1957), see also Holler/Illing (1991).
This notion goes back to Lewis (1969); see also Heal (1978) and Bicchieri (1989).
Lewis (1969) specifies the concept of common knowledge relative to a state of affairs S in which every party has reason to believe that S indicates to every party that every party has reason to believe that S obtains etc. S thus becomes the base of common knowledge. For example, in cases of coordination through mutual agreement this state of affairs is the agreement. In other cases, however, it would be artificial to construct a state of affairs which is the base of common knowledge. Such knowledge often relies on regularities, norms, institutions, which makes it wrong to isolate a particular state of affairs as such a base.
See Rapoport/Guyer/Gordon (1976) and Kern/Räder (1988).
This interpretation corresponds to the approach based on second-order preferences introduced by Sen (1974) into the discussion of the prisoners’ dilemma. I criticize this approach in ch. 8 below.
The two standard works on the logic of collective decision-making are still Arrow (1951) and Sen (1970). For a survey cf. Sen (1986), Mueller (1979), Rothkirch (1981) and Kern/Nida-Rümelin (1994).
Although the logical analysis of collective decision-making goes back to the eighteenth century (see Condorcet (1785), also Kern/Nida-Rümelin (1994), ch. 3), Arrow’s book (1951) marks its real beginning. Ch. 5 of this book develops the so called ‘possibility theorem’, which is better labelled ‘impossibility theorem’, since it prima facie excludes an aggregation which satisfies reasonable conditions.
On the problem of how to interpret aggregate functions see Nida-Rümelin (1986, 1987a, 1991a) and Tanguiane (1992), who argues for a rehabilitation of dictatorial decision-rules through introducing an element of democratic representation.
Kern/Nida-Rümelin (1994), ch. 4.
The liberal paradox was first discovered by Sen (1970), ch. 6, and has prompted an extensive discussion, the highlights of which are Nozick’s (1973, 1974) libertarian proposal to exclude liberal rights from the aggregation, the theorem of Gibbard (1973) and the critique of ‘welfarism’ by Sen (1979). See Breyer (1978), Krüger/Gärtner (1983), Wriglesworth (1985), Riley (1986), Mezzetti (1987), Barry (1987).
See Gibbard (1973), Satterthwaite (1975), Schmeidler/Sonnenschein (1978).
Slote (1989) develops an interesting attack — ultimately inspired by a puritanical attitude — on conceptions of rationality based on optimization. Aporetic consequences of optimizing rationality are illustrated with reference to sociological and biological facts by Elster (1979, 1983, 1986); see also Campbell/Sowden (1985) and the interesting conception of ‘bounded rationality’ in Simon (1983a).
This is suggested by Suppes (1973) and criticized in Nida-Rümelin (1987a), §10.
Since the early fifties Harsanyi has developed different versions of this pure rational ethics in a series of articles (1953, 1955, 1958, 1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1985).
Cf. ch. 7.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Nida-Rümelin, J. (1997). Rational Choice: Extensions and Revisions. In: Economic Rationality and Practical Reason. Theory and Decision Library, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8814-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8814-0_2
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