Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T05:12:26.323Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Is Individual Choice Less Problematic than Collective Choice?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Gregory S. Kavka
Gregory S. Kavka
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is commonplace to suppose that the theory of individual rational choice is considerably less problematic than the theory of collective rational choice. In particular, it is often assumed by philosophers, economists, and other social scientists that an individual's choices among outcomes (or lotteries yielding specified probabilities of outcomes) accurately reflect that individual's underlying preferences or values. Further, it is now well known that if an individual's choices among outcomes (or lotteries thereof) satisfy certain plausible axioms of rationality or consistency, that individual's choice-behavior can be interpreted as maximizing expected utility on a utility scale that is unique up to a linear transformation (Ramsey, 1931; Savage, 1954; Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944). Hence, there is, in principle, an empirically respectable method of measuring individuals' values and a single unified schema for explaining their actions as value maximizing (insofar as they act rationally).

Type
Essays
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , October 1991 , pp. 143 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arrow, Kenneth J. 1951. Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Arrow, Kenneth J. 1969. “Values and Collective Decision-Making.” In Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Third Series, edited by Laslett, P. and Runciman, R. C., pp. 215–32. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Arrow, Kenneth J., and Raynaud, Herve. 1986. Social Choice and Multicriterion Decision-Making. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Blair, D. H., and Pollak, R. A.. 1982. “Acyclic Collective Choice Rules.” Econometrica 50:931–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brandt, Richard. 1979. A Theory of the Good and the Right. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Joseph. 1726. Five Sermons, edited by Brown, Stuart. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950.Google Scholar
Cherniak, Christopher. 1986. Minimal Rationality. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Ward. 1967. “The Theory of Decision Making.” In Decision Making, edited by Edwards, Ward and Tversky, Amos. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Elster, Jon. 1983. Sour Grapes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elster, Jon.(editor). 1985a. The Multiple Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Elster, Jon. 1985b. “Weakness of the Will and the Free-rider Problem.” Economics and Philosophy 1:231–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feld, Scott, and Grofman, Bernard. 1990. “Voting in One's Head as a Source of Nearly Transitive Individual Preferences over Multi-Dimensional Issues.” Typescript, University of California, Irvine. Forthcoming in Annals of Operations Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauthier, David. 1986. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1980. The Panda's Thumb. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Grether, D. M., and Plott, C. R.. 1979. “Economic Theory of Choice and the Preference Reversal Phenomenon.” American Economic Review 69:623–38.Google Scholar
Hernnstein, R. J. 1988. “Lost and Found: One Self.” Ethics 98:566–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan, edited by MacPherson, C. B.. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.Google Scholar
Kahnemann, Daniel, Slovik, Paul, and Tversky, Amos. 1982. Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kavka, Gregory S. 1986. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Krause, Ulrich, and Steedman, Ian. 1985. “Goethe's Faust, Arrow's Possibility Theorem and the Individual Decision-Taker.” In Elster, 1985a, pp. 197–231.Google Scholar
Kelsey, D.. 1986. “Utility and the Individual: An Analysis of Internal Conflicts.” Social Choice and Welfare 3:77–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levi, Isaac. 1986. Hard Choices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Little, I. D. M. 1950. A Critique of Welfare Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Luce, R. D. 1988. “Where Does Subjective Expected Utility Fail Descriptively?” Irvine: Irvine Research Unit in Mathematical Behavioral Science, University of California.Google Scholar
Luce, R. D., and Raiffa, Howard. 1957. Games and Decisions. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
May, K. O. 1954. “Transitivity, Utility, and Aggregation in Preference Patterns.” Econometrica 22:1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ordeshook, Peter C. 1986. Game Theory and Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raiffa, Howard. 1968. Decision Analysis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Ramsey, Frank P. 1931. “Truth and Probability.” In The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, edited by Braithwaite, R. B., pp. 156–98. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Savage, Leonard J. 1954. Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya. 1970. Collective Choice and Social Welfare. San Francisco: Holden-Day.Google Scholar
Shaw, Marilyn. 1982. “Attending to Multiple Sources of Information: 1. The Integration of Information in Decision Making.” Cognitive Psychology 14:353–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Herbert. 1957. Models of Man. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Taylor, Michael. 1987. The Possibility of Cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Von Neumann, John, and Morgenstern, Oskar. 1944. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar