The rationality of rational fools —The role of commitments, persons and agents in rational choice modeling

Subjective payoffs that represent given preferences “all things considered” together withstrictly uncommitted opportunity taking cannot account for the behavior of personal actors. It is shown how agent basedapproaches can explicitly capture internal commitments of persons while sticking to conventional utility cum probabilityrepresentations of desires and beliefs. However, if rational choice modeling is taken to this extreme, conventionalanalyses in terms of reasoning become implausible since sub-personal agents are not persons endowed with highercognitive faculties. Starting from preference representations without looking into the black box of mental processes willhinder theoretical progress.