Reason-Based Rationalization (Franz Dietrich & Christian List)

Christian List (London School of Economics)

Mon 17 Mar

5.00pm, Room 243, second floor, Senate House, WC1 Christian List (LSE) Reason-Based Rationalization (Franz Dietrich & Christian List)

Abstract: “Reason-based rationalizations” explain an agent’s choices by specifying which properties of the options or choice context he/she cares about (the “motivationally salient properties”) and how he/she cares about these properties (the “fundamental preference relation”). We characterize the choice-behavioural implications of reason-based rationalizability and identify two kinds of context-dependent motivation in a reason-based agent: he/she may (i) care about different properties in different contexts and (ii) care not only about properties of the options, but also about properties relating to the context. 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.
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The paper is available at http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/PDF-files/Rationalization.pdf   
Poster: http://philosophy.sas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/PracticalReasoningSpring2014.pdf
Organised by Maria Alvarez ([email protected]) and Clayton Littlejohn ([email protected]), King's College London
Admission Free. All welcome. End Announcement.