I am not sure what you mean. Essentially, it tries to find a utility maximiser that behaves in the same way. There are multiple ways of doing this—not one canonical method.
You’re just using a different standard from me to assess the method. By saying it “applies”, I mean that you can feed these techniques imperfect optimizers and they will construct utility-based models their actions. Revealed preference theory can be successfully applied to imperfect optimizers. A good job too, since all known optimisers are imperfect.
Maybe those models don’t have the properties you are looking for—but that doesn’t represent a point of disagreement between us.
Oh, I know it will construct a utility-based optimizer perfectly well. But considering it wont actually determine their preferences, that’s rather useless for most practical purposes—such as the comment you replied to.
We don’t seem to disagree on facts, though, so I don’t think this conversation is going to go anywhere.
Um, “revealed preference theory” applies to imperfect optimizers just fine.
Does it have a canonical method of isolating the utility function from the details of the optimization process?
I am not sure what you mean. Essentially, it tries to find a utility maximiser that behaves in the same way. There are multiple ways of doing this—not one canonical method.
No, it doesn’t. It treats actual preferences and mistakes made while trying to implement them the same way.
You’re just using a different standard from me to assess the method. By saying it “applies”, I mean that you can feed these techniques imperfect optimizers and they will construct utility-based models their actions. Revealed preference theory can be successfully applied to imperfect optimizers. A good job too, since all known optimisers are imperfect.
Maybe those models don’t have the properties you are looking for—but that doesn’t represent a point of disagreement between us.
Oh, I know it will construct a utility-based optimizer perfectly well. But considering it wont actually determine their preferences, that’s rather useless for most practical purposes—such as the comment you replied to.
We don’t seem to disagree on facts, though, so I don’t think this conversation is going to go anywhere.