Revealed preference and indifferent selection

Eric Danan

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: It is shown that preferences can be constructed from observed choice behavior in a way that is robust to indifferent selection (i.e., the agent is indifferent between two alternatives but, nevertheless, is only observed selecting one of them). More precisely, a suggestion by Savage (1954) to reveal indifferent selection by considering small monetary perturbations of alternatives is formalized and generalized to a purely topological framework: references over an arbitrary topological space can be uniquely derived from observed behavior under the assumptions that they are continuous and nonsatiated and that a strictly preferred alternative is always chosen, and indifferent selection is then characterized by discontinuity in choice behavior. Two particular cases are then analyzed: monotonic preferences over a partially ordered set, and preferences representable by a continuous pseudo-utility function.

Keywords: Revealed preference; indifference; choice behavior; continuity; nonsatiation; monotonicity; pseudo-utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/952.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Revealed preference and indifferent selection (2008)
Working Paper: Revealed preference and indifferent selection (2008)
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:upf:upfgen:952

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).