Veit, Walter
(2024)
What to make of intransitive preferences?
[Preprint]
Abstract
The axiom of transitivity has been challenged in economic theorizing for over seventy years. Yet, there does not seem to be any movement in economics towards removing classical rational choice models from introductory microeconomics books. The concept of rationality has similarly been employed in the cognitive sciences and biology, and yet, transitivity has here not only been shown to be violated, but also rationally so. Some economists have thus responded with attempts to develop alternative theories that give up on the axiom of transitivity. In this paper, I argue that there is a conceptual confusion in this debate that rests on the mistaken idea that there is something like the ‘one true theory of rationality’ that can determine axioms like transitivity to be true or false. Instead, I defend a shift towards a pluralism of concepts of rationality as well as models in which transitivity should play a role depending on the purposes of the model at hand.
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