Reason-Based Rationalization

Franz Dietrich and Christian List

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We introduce a “reason-based” way of rationalizing an agent’s choice behaviour, which explains choices by specifying which properties of the options or choice context the agent cares about (the “motivationally salient properties”) and how he or she cares about these properties (the “fundamental preference relation”). Reason-based rationalizations can explain non-classical choice behaviour, including boundedly rational and sophisticated rational behaviour, and predict choices in unobserved contexts, an issue neglected in standard choice theory. We characterize the behavioural implications of different reason-based models and distinguish two kinds of context-dependent motivation: “context-variant” motivation, where the agent cares about different properties in different contexts, and “context-regarding” motivation, where the agent cares not only about properties of the options, but also about properties relating to the context.

Keywords: reasons; rationalization; context-dependence; motivational salience; properties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B40 B49 B5 C0 C00 D0 D00 D01 D03 D8 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11-25
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/51776/1/MPRA_paper_51776.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Reason-Based Rationalization (2014)
Working Paper: Reason-Based Rationalization (2013)
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:pra:mprapa:51776

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().