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Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at …
The Puzzle Of Ex Ante Efficiency: Does Rational Approvability Have Moral Weight?, Matthew D. Adler
The Puzzle Of Ex Ante Efficiency: Does Rational Approvability Have Moral Weight?, Matthew D. Adler
Faculty Scholarship
A governmental decision is "ex ante efficient" if it maximizes the satisfaction of everyone's preferences ex ante, relative to other possible decisions. Equivalently, each affected person would be rational to approve the decision, given her preferences and beliefs at the time of the choice. Does this matter, morally speaking? Do governmental officials - legislators, judges, regulators - have a moral reason to make decisions that are ex ante efficient? The economist's answer is "yes." "Ex ante efficiency" is widely seen by welfare economists to have moral significance, and often appears within law-and-economics scholarship as a criterion for evaluating legal doctrines. …
Introduction To, Preferences And Rational Choice: New Perspectives And Legal Implications, Matthew D. Adler, Claire Finkelstein, Peter Huang
Introduction To, Preferences And Rational Choice: New Perspectives And Legal Implications, Matthew D. Adler, Claire Finkelstein, Peter Huang
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Book Review, Matthew D. Adler
Book Review, Matthew D. Adler
Faculty Scholarship
Reviewing, Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason (Ruth Chang ed., 1997)
Rationality And The Foundations Of Positive Political Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Michael F. Thies
Rationality And The Foundations Of Positive Political Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Michael F. Thies
Faculty Scholarship
In this paper, we discuss and debunk the four most common critiques of the rational choice research program (which we prefer to call Positive Political Theory) by explaining and advocating its foundations: the rationality assumption, component analysis (abstraction), strategic behavior, and theory building, in turn. We argue that the rationality assumption and component analysis, properly understood, can be seen to underlie all social science, despite the protestations of critics. We then discuss the two ways that PPT most clearly contributes to political science (i.e., what distinguishes it from other research programs), namely the introduction of strategic behavior (people do not …