Computable approaches to rational choice and decision-making

Abstract

The capacity of agents to act rationally, that is to make choices that positively reflect their interests, is a core assumption underlying democratic governance systems, microeconomics, decision science, market driven economies, and many agent based modeling efforts. In this paper we investigate axiomatic theories of rational choice from the perspective of computability. Using algorithmic complexity, we show highly general conditions under which no effective procedure can exist enabling these theories to identify sequences of choices as random. While axiomatic theories of rational choice yield powerful descriptions of choice behavior, this power comes at the expense of axioms which can be brittle with regard to computability limits.