Choice Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Rating:
Summary: Clear but overly technical in its focus
Review: I bought this book on impulse when I was also buying Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction on a recommendation. I'm afraid the moral I now take from this story was "trust recommendations, not your impulses." This was a frustrating book.

I was hoping this book would give me a clear non-technical explanation of the interesting or surprising implications in choice theory. Instead, it gave a clear non-technical explanation of the technical content of choice theory. It seemed indifferent to interpreting what this content meant in practical or non-technical terms.

I think this would be a good book for someone trying to understand the persnickety logical foundations of choice theory but a bad one for someone hoping to understand something about, well, choice and decision-making.

For instance, chapter 2 is almost 20 pages, a fair bit in a book of 120 pages. Yet it devotes itself almost exclusively to explaining the relation between preference functions, cardinal utilities, and ordinal utilities. It discusses the formal conditions necessary for different kinds of preference relations and utilities to be logically equivalent, and the difference between defined terms like "rationality" and "reasonableness".

This is rather dry material, and there was virtually no word on whether these formal conditions were accurate descriptions of people's behavior, or whether we should wish they were. I would have loved to hear a discussion of their intuitive meaning and the extent of their relevance. Are preferences transitive? Is the expansion condition consistent, for instance, with the way people respond to prices through framing effects? I honestly don't know, and I'm annoyed the book was totally silent on these questions. Maybe the criticisms of the formalism of rational decision making are all called "behavioral economics," but it seems like material relevant to a short non-technical introduction.

This pattern persisted in the other chapters, which covered rationality under different forms of uncertainty, risk aversion, strategic behavior in conflict & cooperation, and voting theory.

Another peeve of mine was how the author repeatedly mentioned how some basic definition or another could not be used to justify redistributive taxation. It seemed like he had an axe to grind, since the comment was usually a non sequitur, and since he never went on to discuss the genuine technical issues that I would suppose are involved (inter-subjective utility comparison, the relation between risk appetites and utility schedules, etc.). Frankly, if choice theory is the welter of arbitrary and farflung definitions that the book presents it as being, I wonder that it could be used to justify any political opinion at all!

As I said, the book may a good summary of the technical foundations of choice theory but it offered little insight for understanding human choice or decision-making in a formalized but intuitive way, which is thing thing I wanted. For all I know, the book is comprehensive and accurate, and my response only reveals my own my own prejudices about the field itself.

Rating:
Summary: Clear but overly technical in its focus
Review: I bought this book on impulse when I was also buying Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction on a recommendation. I'm afraid the moral I now take from this story was "trust recommendations, not your impulses." This was a frustrating book.

I was hoping this book would give me a clear non-technical explanation of the interesting or surprising implications in choice theory. Instead, it gave a clear non-technical explanation of the technical content of choice theory. It seemed indifferent to interpreting what this content meant in practical or non-technical terms.

I think this would be a good book for someone trying to understand the persnickety logical foundations of choice theory but a bad one for someone hoping to understand something about, well, choice and decision-making.

For instance, chapter 2 is almost 20 pages, a fair bit in a book of 120 pages. Yet it devotes itself almost exclusively to explaining the relation between preference functions, cardinal utilities, and ordinal utilities. It discusses the formal conditions necessary for different kinds of preference relations and utilities to be logically equivalent, and the difference between defined terms like "rationality" and "reasonableness".

This is rather dry material, and there was virtually no word on whether these formal conditions were accurate descriptions of people's behavior, or whether we should wish they were. I would have loved to hear a discussion of their intuitive meaning and the extent of their relevance. Are preferences transitive? Is the expansion condition consistent, for instance, with the way people respond to prices through framing effects? I honestly don't know, and I'm annoyed the book was totally silent on these questions. Maybe the criticisms of the formalism of rational decision making are all called "behavioral economics," but it seems like material relevant to a short non-technical introduction.

This pattern persisted in the other chapters, which covered rationality under different forms of uncertainty, risk aversion, strategic behavior in conflict & cooperation, and voting theory.

Another peeve of mine was how the author repeatedly mentioned how some basic definition or another could not be used to justify redistributive taxation. It seemed like he had an axe to grind, since the comment was usually a non sequitur, and since he never went on to discuss the genuine technical issues that I would suppose are involved (inter-subjective utility comparison, the relation between risk appetites and utility schedules, etc.). Frankly, if choice theory is the welter of arbitrary and farflung definitions that the book presents it as being, I wonder that it could be used to justify any political opinion at all!

As I said, the book may a good summary of the technical foundations of choice theory but it offered little insight for understanding human choice or decision-making in a formalized but intuitive way, which is thing thing I wanted. For all I know, the book is comprehensive and accurate, and my response only reveals my own my own prejudices about the field itself.