On the sufficiency of transitive preferences

Theodore Turocy

Economics Bulletin, 2007, vol. 4, issue 22, 1-9

Abstract: The assumption that preferences are transitive, or, roughly equivalently, that choice behavior satisfies the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference, is at the core of much classical normative decision theory. This paper asks to what degree this restricts the possible outcomes of choice behavior: are there objectives that could not be attained by an agent adhering to WARP that could be attained by choices that would be said to be "intransitive"? It is argued that the answer to this question is "no" in one setting of choice under random budget sets any outcome obtained by intransitive choice methods can also be obtained by transitive ones.

JEL-codes: D0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-06-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/EB/2007/Volume4/EB-07D00006A.pdf (application/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:ebl:ecbull:eb-07d00006

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().