This survey paper prepared for the Handbook of Utility Theory covers the axiomatic foundation of decision making under uncertainty when conditional preferences are allowed to be state dependent, leading to an expected state-dependent utility representation.

This paper discusses the ways by which a certain type of behavioral deviation from expected utility theory has been handled by psychologists and economists. With respect to the historical background of decision theory in economics, it is argued that there are good reasons for more theoretical...

This volume – Predicting Crisis: Five Essays on the Mathematic Prediction of Economic and Social Crises – is the first of three sets of essays. In this first set the economic and social history of the United States is shown to be a “system of movement,” i.e. a logical and mathematic...

Price elasticity of demand measures how much, in terms of percentage change, the quantity demanded responds to a change in price. In this pedagogical note, first we intuitively introduce the very first notion of price elasticity, which is a directional measure because it describes the impact of...

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Instead, preferences are usually assumed to be fixed and exogenously given. We introduce a framework for conceptualizing preference formation...

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behavioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

The paper argues for the formal investigation of conditions under which that preference reltions are definable in various simple languages. An example of such an investigation is given.

Bergin and Lipman (1996) show that the refinement effect from the random mutations in the adaptive population dynamics in Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) and Young (1993) is due to restrictions on how these mutation rates vary across population states. We here model mutation rates as...