A Money-Pump for Acyclic Intransitive Preferences

The standard argument for the claim that rational preferences are transitive is the pragmatic money-pump argument. However, a money-pump only exploits agents with cyclic strict preferences. In order to pump agents who violate transitivity but without a cycle of strict preferences, one needs to someh...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDialectica Vol. 64; no. 2; pp. 251 - 257
Main Author Gustafsson, Johan E.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2010
Blackwell
Subjects
Ales
Ambivalence
Circular logic
Counterexamples
Dialectic
Filosofiämnen
Historisk-filosofiska ämnen
History and philosophy subjects
HUMANIORA och RELIGIONSVETENSKAP
HUMANITIES and RELIGION
Philosophical logics. Philosophy of language
Philosophy
Philosophy subjects
Pumps
Rationality
Reason
Knowledge theory
Preference
Transitivity
Philosophical Logic
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Summary:The standard argument for the claim that rational preferences are transitive is the pragmatic money-pump argument. However, a money-pump only exploits agents with cyclic strict preferences. In order to pump agents who violate transitivity but without a cycle of strict preferences, one needs to somehow induce such a cycle. Methods for inducing cycles of strict preferences from non-cyclic violations of transitivity have been proposed in the literature, based either on offering the agent small monetary transaction premiums or on multi-dimensional preferences. This paper argues that previous proposal have been flawed and presents a new approach based on the dominance principle.
Bibliography:istex:AA83AC78E4B0530313E59F910332C9B31AF063F3
ArticleID:DLTC1230
ark:/67375/WNG-6BVZC8W0-S
ISSN:0012-2017
1746-8361
1746-8361
DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2010.01230.x