Inferential Choice Theory

Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan, Efe Ok and Pietro Ortoleva
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Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan: McMaster University
Efe Ok: New York University
Pietro Ortoleva: Princeton University

Working Papers from Princeton University. Economics Department.

Abstract: Despite being the fundamental primitive of the study of decision-making in economics, choice correspondences are not observable: even for a single menu of options, we observe at most one choice of an individual at a given point in time, as opposed to the set of all choices she deems most desirable in that menu. However, it may be possible to observe a person choose from a feasible menu at various times, repeatedly. We propose a method of inferring the choice correspondence of an individual from this sort of choice data. First, we derive our method axiomatically, assuming an ideal dataset. Next, we develop statistical techniques to implement this method for real-world situations where the sample at hand is often fairly small. As an application, we use the data of two famed choice experiments from the literature to infer the choice correspondences of the participating subjects.

Keywords: Choice Correspondences; Estimation; Stochastic Choice Functions; Transitivity of Preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D11 D12 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cwa, nep-dcm, nep-ecm and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:econom:2021-60

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