Talk:Preference

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It is very clear that sexual preference has nothing to do with economics, this art needs breaking up into a disambig. In process now.SatuSuro 04:22, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

The non-economic aspect of this art has gone to a new Preference (behaviour) Please feel free to re-arrange if offended by what seems an obious needed change SatuSuro 04:32, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

See Talk:Preference (behaviour).--Patrick 01:01, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Strong agree. This page needs to be moved, and a disamiguation page set in its place. Legis 12:40, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tribute

Thanks to those that have synthesized a magnificent open source entry for Preference.

Beautiful conTribution! --Dialectic 15:05, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] preference relation

The preference relation is type set here to look like less than or equal to, but this is not the preffered character. The wikiML does not appear to have the right character, is there anything to be done? Pdbailey 20:33, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Just to be clear, what we need is (in PlainTeX) \succ and \succeq

Pdbailey 20:33, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Transitive preferences

If a consumer has a preference relation that violates transitivity, then an unscrupulous person can milk them as follows. Suppose the consumer has an apple, and prefers apples to oranges, oranges to bananas, and bananas to apples. Then, the consumer would be prepared to pay, say, one cent to trade their apple for a banana, because they prefer bananas to apples. After that, they would pay once cent to trade their banana for an orange, and again the orange for an apple, and so on.

First of all I would suggest using exploit rather than milk. Second, it simply isn't true. The budget constraint would eventually mean that the consumer runs out of money, even if you looked at it over time. Also, you might have a consumer who prefers a specific amount of one good but dislikes any other amount even if it is larger than the preffered amount. Such a consumer does not have transitive preferences and may choose not to spend his entire income. One point raised by critics of transitive preferences is that socially responsible consumers may choose not to be "greedy". But that does not imply that they can be exploited.

The reason economists assume transitive preferences is to ensure that we can use a utility function. However, even if preferences weren't transitive we could still maximise them but we would have to use a more general concept known as a correspondance. Functions are a subclass of correspondances that provide a unique mapping. Correspondances in genral do not ensure this, hence we get either corner solutions or multiple solutions. The article completely misses this point. MartinDK 17:09, 8 November 2006 (UTC)