Where do preferences come from? A summary

The paper to be presented at this conference (Dietrich and List 2013) sketches some basic ideas underlying a broader, ongoing decision-theoretic project. In that project, we aim to develop a new, general approach to decision theory which (i) improves upon standard decision theory in both its idealized, ‘rational’ and its more psychologically informed, ‘behavioural’variants (the former are associated with classical rational choice theory, the latter with behaviourial economics and economic psychology); (ii) is widely applicable in the social sciences and in philosophy; and (iii) provides a framework for expressing some key philosophical debates about the relationship between reasons and rational decisions, which are not adequately captured by standard formal decision theory. One important task is the development of a theory of preference formation and preference change, since standard decision theory says very little about where an agent’s preferences come from and when they might change. Here, we introduce a simple formal framework for modelling preference formation and preference change.1