What distinguishes preference utilitarianism (PU) from other utilitarian positions is the axiological component: the view concerning what is intrinsically valuable. According to PU, intrinsic value is based on preferences. Intrinsically valuable states are connected to our preferences (wants, desires) being satisfied.

Jon Elster reports that in 1940, and again in 1970, the U.S. draft lottery was challenged for falling short of the legally mandated ‘random selection’ (1989, pp. 45–6). On both occasions, the physical mixing of the lots appeared to be incomplete, since the birth dates were clustered in a way that would have been extremely unlikely if the lots were fully mixed. There appears to have been no suspicion on either occasion that the deficiency in the mixing was intended, known, or believed to favor or disfavor any identifiable group. If the selection was non-random in the way charged, Elster asks, was it unfair?

More than many other Austrians, Mises tried to found aprioristic methodology on a well defined and developed epistemology. Although references to Kant are scattered rather unsystematically throughout his works, he nevertheless used an unequivocal Kantian terminology. He explicitly defended the existence of ‘a priori knowledge’, ‘synthetic a priori propositions’, ‘the category of action’, and so forth.

The most important analytical tool in non-cooperative game theory is the concept of a Nash equilibrium, which is a collection of possibly mixed strategies, one for each player, with the property that each player's strategy is a best reply to the strategies of the other players. If we do not go into normative game theory, which concerns itself with the recommendation of strategies, and focus instead entirely on the positive theory of prediction, two alternative interpretations of the Nash equilibrium concept are predominantly available.

In the more traditional one, a Nash equilibrium is a prediction of actual play. A game may not have a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies, and a mixed strategy equilibrium may be difficult to incorporate into this interpretation if it involves the idea of actual randomization over equally good pure strategies. In another interpretation originating from Harsanyi (1973a), see also Rubinstein (1991), and Aumann and Brandenburger (1991), a Nash equilibrium is a ‘consistent’ collection of probabilistic expectations, conjectures, on the players. It is consistent in the sense that for each player each pure strategy, which has positive probability according to the conjecture about that player, is indeed a best reply to the conjectures about others.