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Hard Choices: Decision Making under Unresolved Conflict
It is a commonplace that in making decisions agents often have to juggle competing values, and that no choice will maximize satisfaction of them all. However, the prevailing account of these cases assumes that there is always a single ranking of the agent's values, and therefore no unresolvable conflict among them. Isaac Levi denies this assumption, arguing that agents often must choose without having balanced their different values and that to be rational, an act does not have to be optimal, only what Levi terms "admissible." This book explores the consequences of denying the assumption and develops a general approach to decision-making under unresolved conflict. Professor Levi argues not only against the "strict Bayesian" position, but also against all the recent attempts to develop alternative models to Bayesianism. The book, which continues from his earlier The Enterprise of Knowledge, is certain to make an original and controversial contribution to the debates over choice theory.
264 pages, Paperback
First published November 28, 1986
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June 1, 2020
This is a great topic. Basically economists have this axiom, the axiom of revealed preferences, which says that if people choose one thing over another, it is because they prefer that thing. This is intuitive, but it skips over the possibility that maybe agents make decisions even though they are not sure which item they prefer. Instead there are numerous (V) admissible items and the agent has to choose between them. This is a very serious problem, and there are some nice examples showing how having more than one primary criterion along with some secondary criteria can lead to odd behavior.
The book itself does a fine job of going through the topics but often spends too much time discussing what other people in the literature do. For me, this really lost my attention and I had a hard time getting into the substance because of it. The second half is rather technical but it is very clear for what it is.
The book itself does a fine job of going through the topics but often spends too much time discussing what other people in the literature do. For me, this really lost my attention and I had a hard time getting into the substance because of it. The second half is rather technical but it is very clear for what it is.
Displaying 1 of 1 review