People constantly make choices or decisions in an uncertain world: should I buy life insurance, marry, change jobs? Rational decision making is an important topic in the social sciences, cognitive science, and philosophy, and for many years classical decision theory has dominated competing accounts of decision making.
Most of classical decision theory was developed over the first sixty years of the twentieth century. The theory focuses on instrumental rationality, that is, on reasoning about how agents can best achieve their desires in light of their beliefs. Decisions take place under three conditions: certainty (outcomes of actions are certain), risk (outcomes are not certain but their probabilities are known…
Descriptive interpretations of classical decision theory are supposed to provide (at least some) information about how people actually behave. These interpretations lie at the heart of modern economics and related social sciences. Many arguments for descriptive interpretations of classical decision theory are based on the claim that the theory provides sound normative guidance, together with the v…
Normative interpretations of classical decision theory are supposed to show how people should behave. A rational person, in this view, will take the action with the highest expected probability. Many arguments for the claim that decision theory is a good normative model for decision making portray irrationality as self-subversion. If an agent violates the theory, he will, over the long run, act in…
There are various friendly amendments to classical decision theory; for example, there is now more focus on the role of causation in decision making and on plans and sequences of decisions. Other work involves larger departures. For example, some behavioral decision theorists argue that desires and beliefs are notcaptured by the classical account. Tversky's and Kahneman's prospect th…
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: Rou…
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