The theory of decision making.

Many social scientists other than psychologists try to account for the behavior of individuals. Economists and a few psychologists have produced a large body of theory and a few experiments that deal with individual decision making. The kind of decision making with which this body of theory deals is as follows: given two states, A and B, into either one of which an individual may put himself, the individual chooses A in preference to B (or vice versa). For instance, a child standing in front of a candy counter may be considering two states. In state A the child has $0.25 and no candy. In state B the child has $0.15 and a ten-cent candy bar. The economic theory of decision making is a theory about how to predict such decisions. Economic theorists have been concerned with this problem since the days of Jeremy Bentham (17481832). In recent years the development of the economic theory of consumer's decision making (or, as the