How your intentions reshape what counts as a rational choice
A new paper challenges how economists and decision-theorists define rational behavior when people care about hypothetical scenarios. The researchers show that what you intend to do can actually change what would have happened—and therefore what choices make sense now. This reshapes debates about planning, commitment, and how to model human decision-making in practice.
Originaltitel: Counterfactuals, intention and dynamic choice
Abstract Building on work by Bradley and Stefánsson (British J Philosophy Sci 68(2): 485–533, 2017), we consider counterfactually-dependent preferences in a dynamic setting. In particular, we consider the interaction between such preferences and rational intention. We point out a hitherto unrecognised role for intentions: they can fix what would have been and thus influence the rationality of choosing certain actually available options. We furthermore argue that orthodox sophisticated choice can be understood in two ways in this setting. Actualist sophistication faces the problem of being overly restrictive and of potential probabilistic incoherence. Possibilist sophistication avoids these problems but faces the problem of being overly permissive and of violating the spirit of forward-looking consequentialism. Indeed, we show that possibilist sophistication can rationalise behaviour otherwise associated with resolute choice.