Christian List

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Reasons, rationality, and choice | go back to projects

Standard decision theory (as familiar from economics and the social sciences) provides, at most, a simplified account of individual decision-making.

Jointly with Franz Dietrich (CNRS), I have been developing a "reason-based" approach to the theory of individual choice which (i) improves upon standard decision theory in both its idealized, "classical" and its psychologically informed, "behavioural" variants; (ii) is widely applicable; and (iii) provides an explicit model of the reasons behind choices.

This work has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust through a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

Highlighted papers

What matters and how it matters: A choice-theoretic representation of moral theories (with F. Dietrich), The Philosophical Review 126(4): 421-479, 2017

Reason-based choice and context-dependence: An explanatory framework (with F. Dietrich), Economics and Philosophy 32(2): 175-229

Mentalism versus behaviourism in economics: a philosophy-of-science perspective (with F. Dietrich), Economics and Philosophy 32(2): 249-281

A reason-based theory of rational choice (with F. Dietrich), Nous 47(1): 104-134, 2013

Where do preferences come from? (with F. Dietrich), International Journal of Game Theory 42(3): 613-637, 2013

Reasons for (prior) belief in Bayesian epistemology (with F. Dietrich), Synthese 19(5): 787-808, 2013

A Model of Non-informational Preference Change (with F. Dietrich), Journal of Theoretical Politics 23(2): 145-164, 2011

Subsidiary papers

Where do preferences come from? A summary (with F. Dietrich), Proceedings of the International Conference on Logic Across the University: Foundations and Applications (Beijing, China), 2013

Our response in these Proceedings to replies to our paper: A response to Baltag, Girard, and White

Other decision-theoretic papers

Belief revision generalized: A joint characterization of Bayes's and Jeffrey's rules (with F. Dietrich and R. Bradley), Journal of Economic Theory 162: 352-371, 2016 (click here for earlier version with additional results)

Desire-as-belief revisited (with Richard Bradley), Analysis 69(1): 31-37, 2009

The Two-Envelope Paradox: An Axiomatic Approach (with F. Dietrich), Mind 114(454): 239-248, 2005

Framing as Path-Dependence (with N. Gold), Economics and Philosophy 20(2): 253-277, 2004

 

Last modified June 2018

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