Abstract

The idea of confining the idea of ‘rationality’ with that of the ‘choice of best elements’ unnecessarily limits the sense and scope of ‘rationality’. The existing internal consistency conditions that are popularly used in the social choice theory to assess a choice function are insufficient to analyse several choice patterns. The paper tries to address that problem by accepting a broader definition of rationality and characterizes choice behaviours where an individual chooses a k-th best element from set of alternatives, where k is an integer.