This course will cover selected topics in rational choice theory, which informally is the analysis of how to make correct decision in a given context. The course offers an introduction to the main normative theories of rational choice: von Neumann-Morgenstern theory of expected utility, Anscombe-Aumanns account and Savages theory of choice under uncertainty. Possible topics may include, and are not limited to: individual choice under uncertainty and related issues in the psychology of judgment and decision making, problems of public choice in which a group of individuals must collectively make a decision, game-theoretic problems of conflict and coordination, alternative approaches to the problem of fair division of goods as well as recent theories that abandon the Bayesian assumption that the decision makers beliefs can always be represented by a unique probability distribution. This course will stress the role that formal methods can play in the analysis of decisions and alternative applications of decision theory to issues in philosophy and social science.
