Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare

This book is about preferences, principally as they figure in economics. It also explores their uses in everyday language and action, how they are understood in psychology and how they figure in philosophical reflection on action and morality. The book clarifies and for the most part defends the way in which economists invoke preferences to explain, predict and assess behavior and outcomes. Hausman argues, however, that the predictions and explanations economists offer rely on theories of preference formation that are in need of further development, and he criticizes attempts to define welfare in terms of preferences and to define preferences in terms of choices or self-interest. The analysis clarifies the relations between rational choice theory and philosophical accounts of human action. The book also assembles the materials out of which models of preference formation and modification can be constructed, and it comments on how reason and emotion shape preferences.

Preface; 1. Introduction; Part I. Preferences in Positive Economics: 2. Preference axioms and their implications; 3. Revealed preference theory; 4. Preferences, decision theory, and consequentialism; 5. Game theory and consequentialism; 6. Constraints and counterpreferential choice; Part II. Preferences, Welfare, and Normative Economics: 7. Preference satisfaction and welfare; 8. Preferences in welfare economics; Part III. Psychology, Rational Evaluation, and Preference Formation: 9. The psychology of choice; 10. Constructing preferences; 11. Conclusions.

This book is about preferences, principally as they figure in economics. It clarifies and for the most part defends the way in which economists invoke preferences to explain, predict and assess behavior and outcomes, although it criticizes attempts to define welfare in terms of preferences and to define preferences in terms of choices or self-interest.

Daniel M. Hausman is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and received his Ph.D. in 1978 from Columbia University. His research has centered on epistemological, metaphysical and ethical issues at the boundaries between economics and philosophy. He co-founded the Cambridge University Press journal Economics and Philosophy with Michael McPherson and co-edited it from 1984–1994. He is the author of Capital, Profits, and Prices (1981), The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (1992), Causal Asymmetries (1998) and Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (2006, with Michael McPherson), among other titles. He has published more than 130 essays in academic journals in philosophy and economics. In 2009, Professor Hausman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.