Category: Rationality
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Mark D. White Last month, The Economist published an article (based on research published in Journal of Marketing) on consumers' irrationality when compared discounts and added content: Consumers often struggle to realise, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is better value.…
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Mark D. White In a New York Times op-ed this morning, Daniel E. Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, makes a strong case for our strong attraction to sugar, but a weak case for paternalistic action on the part of the government to limit our consumption of it. The problem is captured by the question he…
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Mark D. White This morning's Baby Blues comic strip falls under the category "out of the mouths of babes": Even litte Hammie knows that it isn't always about the numbers–sometimes it's about the principle of that matter! This made me think of Amartya Sen's example of counterpreferential choice in which a person has to choose…
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Mark D. White Please excuse the flippant title, and get ready for a bit of a rant. (Listen–it's almost Friday, and it's been a rough couple of weeks.) I'll start with a old joke: Two campers are in the woods when they spot a bear heading toward them. One camper starts running while the other…
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Mark D. White A fascinating article in the latest issue of Utilitas (23/4, December 2011) by Toby Handfield (Monash University) titled "Absent Desires" takes up the issue of absent desire in relation to satisfied and frustrated desire, arguing that having absent desires is incommensurable with having satisfied desires: What difference does it make to matters…
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Mark D. White In today's installment of The Stone in The New York Times, UCLA's John McCumber presents a very critical view of "rational choice philosophy," by which he seems to mean the narrow version promulgated by most mainstream economists. In discussing the ethical problem with rational choice theory, he writes: Rational choice theory, being…
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Mark D. White Last night I read a wonderful and concise article by Jillian Craigie (King's College London) from the latest issue of Bioethics (25/6, July 2011) titled "Competence, Practical Rationality and What a Patient Values." The abstract follows: According to the principle of patient autonomy, patients have the right to be self-determining in decisions…
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Mark D. White Barry Schwartz (author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less), Yakov Ben-Haim, and Cliff Dasco have a paper in the latest issue of Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (41/2, June 2011) titled "What Makes a Good Decision? Robust Satisficing as a Normative Standard of Rational Decision Making," in…
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Mark D. White David Brooks has a fascinating article on new research on human nature in today's New York Times (a condensation, of sorts, of his wonderfully written piece in The New Yorker in January–and, apparently, his new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, which was reviewed recently in The…
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Mark D. White As I noted earlier, on December 6 and 7 the blog Truth on the Market hosted "Free to Choose?", an online symposium on behavioral law and economics, the contents of which appear below the fold, followed by an excerpt from Josh Wright's introductory comment.
Mark D. White 