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The Historical Development of Hierarchical Behavior in Economic Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

S. A. Drakopoulos  and
A. D. Karayiannis
S. A. Drakopoulos
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and History of Science, University of Athens, Panepistimioupolis 157 71, Athens, Greece
A. D. Karayiannis
Affiliation:
University of Piraeus, 80, Karaoli & Dimitriou St. 185 34, PiraeusGreece
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Extract

One of the basic ideas underlying the established conception of rational behavior is the unlimited substitutability of preferences. Economic agents are assumed to compare and reduce everything to a common denominator: utility. The most obvious example of such preferences can be found in standard consumer theory where complete substitutability of every good is assumed in the sense that a loss of some units of one bundle can always be compensated by gain of some units of another commodity (such preferences are sometimes called Archimedian—see Borch 1968). This conception of preferences has a long history in economic thought and forms the basis of the standard rational choice theory (Hicks and Allen 1934, Samuelson 1938, Hicks 1946, Houthakker 1950).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 363 - 378
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2004

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