Rational Choice

Allais, Marice. "Le comportement d l'homme rationnel devant le risque: Critique des postulats et axiomes de l'ecole Americanine." Econometrica 21 (1953): 503–546. Develops an early, influential empirical critique of classical utility theory.

Archer, Margaret S., and Jonathon Q. Tritter, eds. Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Essays by sociologists arguing that decision theory is a bad model or human behavior.

Bernoulli, Daniel. "Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Wealth." Econometrica 22 (1954): 23–36. Earliest clear discussion of expected utility. Translated from the Latin, first published in 1738.

Ellsburg, Daniel. "Classical and Current Notions of 'Measurable Utility'." Economic Journal 64 (1954): 528–556. Explains how von Neumann and Morgenstern cardinal utilities differ from both Marshallian cardinal utilities and Paretian ordinal utilities.

———. "Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms." Quarterly Journal of Econmics 75, no. 4 (1961): 643–669. Develops another influential empirical critique of subjective expected utility theory.

Friedman, Milton. "The Methodology of Positive Economics." In his Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1953. Classic statement of economic irrealism, arguing we should predict that people behave as if they were utility maximizers.

Gigerenzer, Gerd, and Daniel G. Goldstein. "Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way: Models of Bounded Rationality." Psychological Review 103, no. 4 (1996): 650–669. Develops a model of bounded, ecological rationality based on fast and frugal heuristics.

Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk." Econometrica 47 (1979): 263–291. Motivated by their earlier, very influential work in behavioral decision theory the authors develop prospect theory as a more accurate empirical account of human decision making.

Jeffrey, Richard C. The Logic of Decision. 2nd ed. Reprint, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. First published in 1983. State-of-the-art version of classical ("evidential") decision theory.

Joyce, James M. The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lucid treatment of causal decision theory in a wider context that subsumes it and classical decision theory under a more general account.

Raiffa, Howard. Decision Analysis. Reading, Mass: Addison–Wesley, 1968. Provides an influential introduction to subjective probability and the application of Bayes theory to decision problems.

Richardson, Henry S. Practical Reasoning about Final Ends. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Urges that there is more to rationality than instrumental rationality, and presents an account about reasoning about what our more basic desires should be.

Savage, Leonard J. The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley, 1954. The classical treatment of decision making with subjective probabilities.

Schick, Frederic. "Dutch Bookies and Money Pumps." Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 112–119. Argues that self-subversion arguments for normative decision theory fail.

Simon, Herbert A. "Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment." Psychological Review 63 (1956): 129–138. Seminal defense of rationality as a bounded enterprise due to human cognitive limitations.

Tuchman, Barbara. The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. New York: Knopf, 1984. Fascinating catalog of actions and policies that led to disaster even by the lights of those who proposed them.

Von Neumann, John, and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. The classical statement of mathematical utility theory.