Seminar: "On the Conceptual Foundations of Rational Choice: Further Elaborations and Extensions"

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Abstract:  In these two lectures aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience, I develop foundational issues in the theory of choice viewed from beyond the purely economic to the psychological, philosophical and  linguistic aspects of decision-making. 

(i)                  The first lecture begins with the so-called Eilenberg-Sonnenschein research program and is alert to the invocation of a variety of registers in mathematics: topological, measure-theoretic, functional-analytic, order-theoretic, statistical, probabilistic, and in this connection a variety of technical terms will be problematized and thereby interrogated:  transitivity (consistency), completeness (decisiveness), solvability,  monotonicity,  continuity, intermediate-valuedness  and convexity.  

(ii)                The second lecture will pay particular attention to time and uncertainty, and how they give added structure to the choice-sets as well as the  binary-relation or n-ary relations defined on these  choice sets.  Two early and foundational texts of behavioral economics,  those of di Finetti (1931a, 1931b) and Simon (1951. 1955) will serve as points of departure.