THE ENGINEERING OF CHOICE AND ORDINARY CHOICE BEHAVIOR

Recently I gave a lecture on elementary decision theory, an introduction to rational theories of choice. After the lecture, a student asked whether it was conceivable that the practical procedures for decision making implicit in theories of choice might make actual human decisions worse rather than better. What is the empirical evidence, he asked, that human choice is improved by knowledge of decision theory or by application of the various engineering forms of rational choice? I answered, I think correctly, that the case for the usefulness of decision engineering rested primarily not on the kind of direct empirical confirmation that he sought, but on two other things: on a set of theorems proving the superiority of particular procedures in particular situations if the situations are correctly specified and the procedures correctly applied, and on the willingness of clients to purchase the services of experts with skills in decision sciences.

The answer may not have been reasonable, but the question clearly was. It articulated a classical challenge to the practice of rational choice, the possibility that processes of rationality might combine with properties of human beings to produce decisions that are less sensible than the unsystematized actions of an intelligent person, or at least that the way in which we might use rational procedures intelligently is not self-evident.