Abstract
When making a choice between competing alternatives, we are primarily guided by our preferences. But the process is typically aided by asking questions. The questions serve to expand the set of possibilities we consider. Nonetheless a reasonable condition we might impose on this process is that the order in which questions are asked is ultimately irrelevant. Someone for whom this is not the case can be manipulated into making unfortunate choices by a careful choice of questions. We develop a logic for reasoning about such processes, use this to provide an independent justification for the rationality of having transitive preferences, and explain what goes wrong in situations where preferences are not transitive, such as Condorcet’s voting paradox.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
van Benthem, J., Minică, Ş.: Toward a dynamic logic of questions. In: He, X., Horty, J., Pacuit, E. (eds.) LORI 2009. LNCS, vol. 5834, pp. 27–41. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Seligman, J., Girard, P.: Being flexible about ceteris paribus (2011), http://auckland.academia.edu/JeremySeligman/Papers/672679
van Benthem, J., Girard, P., Roy, O.: Everything else being equal: a modal logic for ceteris paribus preferences. Journal of Philosophical Logic (August 2008), http://www.springerlink.com/content/p756008882505667/
Xiong, Z., Seligman, J.: A logic of questions for rational choice (2011), http://auckland.academia.edu/JeremySeligman/Papers/672670
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Xiong, Z., Seligman, J. (2011). A Logic of Questions for Rational Choice. In: van Ditmarsch, H., Lang, J., Ju, S. (eds) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6953. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24130-7_36
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24130-7_36
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24129-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24130-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)