The good news is that there are others. Stated and “revealed” preferences don’t come out of nowhere, take it or leave it, choose one or the other. I use the scare quotes because the very name “revealed preference” embeds into the vocabulary an assumption, a whole story, that the “revealed” preference is in fact a revelation of a deeper truth. Cue another riff on this.
No, call revealed preferences merely what they visibly are: your actions. When there is a conflict between what you (this is the impersonal “you”) want to do and what you do, the thing to do is to find the roots of the conflict. What is actually happening when you do the thing you would not, and not the thing that you would?
Some will answer with this again, but real answers to questions about specific instances are not to be found in any story. Something happened when you acted the way you did not want to. There are techniques for getting at real answers to such questions, involving various processes of introspection and questioning … which I’m not going to try to expound, as I don’t think I can do the subject justice.
The good news is that there are others. Stated and “revealed” preferences don’t come out of nowhere, take it or leave it, choose one or the other. I use the scare quotes because the very name “revealed preference” embeds into the vocabulary an assumption, a whole story, that the “revealed” preference is in fact a revelation of a deeper truth. Cue another riff on this.
No, call revealed preferences merely what they visibly are: your actions. When there is a conflict between what you (this is the impersonal “you”) want to do and what you do, the thing to do is to find the roots of the conflict. What is actually happening when you do the thing you would not, and not the thing that you would?
Some will answer with this again, but real answers to questions about specific instances are not to be found in any story. Something happened when you acted the way you did not want to. There are techniques for getting at real answers to such questions, involving various processes of introspection and questioning … which I’m not going to try to expound, as I don’t think I can do the subject justice.