Limited Computational Resources Favor Rationality

Yuval Salant ()

Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract: A choice function is a rule that chooses a single alternative from every set of alternatives drawn from a finite ground set. A rationalizable choice function satisfies the consistency condition; i.e., if an alternative is chosen from a set A, then the same alternative is also chosen from every subset of A that contains it. In this paper we study computational aspects of choice, through choice functions. We explore two simple models that demonstrate two important aspects of choice procedures: the ability to remember the past and the ability to perform complex computations. We show that a choice function is optimal in terms of the amount of memory and the computational power required for its computation if and only if the function is rationalizable. We also show that the computation of most other choice functions, including some “natural” ones, requires much more memory and computational power.

Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2003-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cmp and nep-dcm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp320.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp320.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp320.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:huj:dispap:dp320

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Simkin ().