Indecisiveness, Undesirability and Overload Revealed Through Rational Choice Deferral

Gerasimou, Georgios (2015): Indecisiveness, Undesirability and Overload Revealed Through Rational Choice Deferral.

Abstract

Three reasons why decision makers may defer choice are *indecisiveness* between feasible options, *unattractiveness* of these options and *choice overload*. This paper provides a choice-theoretic explanation for each of these phenomena by means of three deferral-permissive models of decision making that are driven by preference incompleteness, undesirability and complexity constraints, respectively. These models feature *rational* choice deferral in the sense that whenever the individual does choose an option from a menu, this is a most preferred option in that menu, so that choices are always WARP-consistent. The models also allow for the use of observable data to recover the individual's preferences and, where applicable, the indecisiveness and undesirability components of these preferences.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Choice deferral; incomplete preferences; indecisiveness; unattractiveness; choice overload; revealed preference.
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D0 - General > D01 - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles; D - Microeconomics > D0 - General > D03 - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles; D - Microeconomics > D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics > D11 - Consumer Economics: Theory

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