In a recent paper, Samir Okasha presented an argument that suggests that there is no rational way to choose among scientific theories. This would seriously undermine the view that science is a rational entreprise. In this paper I show how a suitably nuanced view of what scientific rationality requires allows us to avoid Okasha’s conclusion. I go on to argue that making further assumptions about...

We consider the optimal control design of an abstract autonomous vehicle (AAV). The AAV searches an area for tasks that are detected with a probability that depends on vehicle speed, and each detected task can be processed or ignored. Both searching and processing are costly, but processing also returns rewards that quantify designer preferences. We generalize results from the analysis of anima...

The present review is based on the thesis that mate choice results from information-processing mechanisms governed by computational rules and that, to understand how females choose their mates, we should identify which are the sources of information and how they are used to make decisions. We describe mate choice as a three-step computational process and for each step we present theories and re...

The rational choice literature on religion has been noticeably silent on the nature and purpose of religious authority. I first summarize the rational choice theory of authority and offer a rational choice definition of religious authority. A primary insight is that (religious) authority exists to coordinate social action. I then argue that social coordination is a fundamental aspect of religio...

We analyze customer’s brand choice of promotion effects on a High-tier brand and Low-tier brand products along dimensions of price and quality. Our empirical findings are based on a self-administered survey of some big grocery chain stores in one major city (Shanghai) in China between August 2006 to August 2008. The article raises a note of caution about promotion asymmetry effect and show that...

We are highly sympathetic to Dhar and Gorlin's goal of developing a dual system theory of choice. But we do feel that the proposal could be changed and clarified in a few ways. Specifically, we believe that the evidence suggests that the systems operate in parallel, not sequentially. In addition, the relation between intuitive/associative processing and affect remains unresolved, a vagueness th...

A Vague Theory of Choice over Time We propose a novel approach to modelling time preferences, based on a cognitive shortcoming of human decision makers: the perception of future events becomes increasingly ‘blurred’ as the events are pushed further in time. We axiomatise a class of preference representations which can be specialised to rationalise ‘anomalies’ such as preference reversals and cy...

This paper offers a short introduction to some of the fundamental results of social choice theory. Topics include Nash implementability, monotonic social choice correspondences, the Muller-Satterthwaite impossibility theorem, anonymous and neutral social choice correspondences, sophisticated solutions of binary agendas, the top cycle of a tournament, the bipartisan set for two-party competition...