If anyone can point me to what kinds of preferences are supposed to be outlawed by this “insist on being a utility function” I would benefit from that.
They say that you are allowed to define utility functions however you want, but that doing so broadly enough can mean that “X is behaving according to a utility function” is no longer anticipation-constraining, so you can’t infer anything new about X from it.
If anyone can point me to what kinds of preferences are supposed to be outlawed by this “insist on being a utility function” I would benefit from that.
See: Why Subagents? for a treatment of how stateless utility functions fail to capture inexploitable path dependent preferences.
This and this are decent discussions.
So it seems i have understood correctly and both of those say that nothing is outlawed (and that incoherence is broken as a concept).
They say that you are allowed to define utility functions however you want, but that doing so broadly enough can mean that “X is behaving according to a utility function” is no longer anticipation-constraining, so you can’t infer anything new about X from it.