•  8838
    Expected Utility Theory
    In John Davis, Wade Hands & Uskali Maki (eds.), Handbook of Economic Methodology, Edward Elgar. pp. 342-350. 1998.
    The paper summarizes expected utility theory, both in its original von Neumann-Morgenstern version and its later developments, and discusses the normative claims to rationality made by this theory.
  •  2715
    The paper has a twofold aim. On the one hand, it provides what appears to be the first game-theoretic modeling of Napoleon’s last campaign, which ended dramatically on 18 June 1815 at Waterloo. It is specifically concerned with the decision Napoleon made on 17 June 1815 to detach part of his army against the Prussians he had defeated, though not destroyed, on 16 June at Ligny. Military historians agree that this decision was crucial but disagree about whether it was rational. Hypothesizing a zer…Read more
  •  2665
    La critique de l'économie politique dans les Grundrisse de Karl Marx
    Dissertation, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. 1978.
    This doctoral thesis was prepared in 1975-77 at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, under the supervision of Prof. Raymond ARON. It was submitted in 1977 in fulfilment of the requirements for a Ph.D. degree in Social Sciences (Doctorat de 3e cycle en sciences sociales). The oral examination (soutenance de thèse) was held in January 1978, with the examination committee consisting of Prof. Aron, Bartoli, Boudon and Brochier. This 250 page unpublished dissertation was the first stu…Read more
  •  2547
    Les origines de la distinction entre positif et normatif en économie
    Revue Philosophique De Louvain 116 (2). 2018.
    Abstract: Economists are accustomed to distinguishing between a positive and a normative component of their work, a distinction that is peculiar to their field, having no exact counterpart in the other social sciences. The distinction has substantially changed over time, and the different ways of understanding it today are reflective of its history. Our objective is to trace the origins and initial forms of the distinction, from the English classical political economy of the first half of the 19…Read more
  •  2170
    Judgment aggregation theory, or rather, as we conceive of it here, logical aggregation theory generalizes social choice theory by having the aggregation rule bear on judgments of all kinds instead of merely preference judgments. It derives from Kornhauser and Sager’s doctrinal paradox and List and Pettit’s discursive dilemma, two problems that we distinguish emphatically here. The current theory has developed from the discursive dilemma, rather than the doctrinal paradox, and the final objective…Read more
  •  1933
    Utility theory and ethics
    with D'Aspremont Claude
    In Salvador Barbera, Peter J. Hammond & Christian Seidl (eds.), Handbook of Utility Theory: Volume 1: Principles, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 371-481. 1998.
    This chapter of the Handbook of Utility Theory aims at covering the connections between utility theory and social ethics. The chapter first discusses the philosophical interpretations of utility functions, then explains how social choice theory uses them to represent interpersonal comparisons of welfare in either utilitarian or non-utilitarian representations of social preferences. The chapter also contains an extensive account of John Harsanyi's formal reconstruction of utilitarianism and its d…Read more
  •  1297
    Rethinking Nudge: Not One But Three Concepts
    Behavioural Public Policy 2 107-124. 2018.
    Nudge is a concept of policy intervention that originates in Thaler and Sunstein's (2008) popular eponymous book. Following their own hints, we distinguish three properties of nudge interventions: they redirect individual choices by only slightly altering choice conditions (here nudge 1), they use rationality failures instrumentally (here nudge 2), and they alleviate the unfavourable effects of these failures (here nudge 3). We explore each property in semantic detail and show that no entailment…Read more
  •  1228
    Spurious Unanimity and the Pareto Principle
    Economics and Philosophy 32 (3): 511-532. 2016.
    The Pareto principle states that if the members of society express the same preference judgment between two options, this judgment is compelling for society. A building block of normative economics and social choice theory, and often borrowed by contemporary political philosophy, the principle has rarely been subjected to philosophical criticism. The paper objects to it on the ground that it indifferently applies to those cases in which the individuals agree on both their expressed preferences a…Read more
  •  1212
    The impartial observer theorem of social ethics
    Economics and Philosophy 17 (2): 147-179. 2001.
    Following a long-standing philosophical tradition, impartiality is a distinctive and determining feature of moral judgments, especially in matters of distributive justice. This broad ethical tradition was revived in welfare economics by Vickrey, and above all, Harsanyi, under the form of the so-called Impartial Observer Theorem. The paper offers an analytical reconstruction of this argument and a step-wise philosophical critique of its premisses. It eventually provides a new formal version of th…Read more
  •  1103
    Le principe de rationalité et l'unité des sciences sociales.
    Revue Economique 53 (2): 301-323. 2002.
    The paper revisits the rationality principle from the particular perspective of the unity of social sciences. It has been argued that the principle was the unique law of the social sciences and that accordingly there are no deep differences between them (Popper). It has also been argued that the rationality principle was specific to economics as opposed to the other social sciences, especially sociology (Pareto). The paper rejects these opposite views on the grounds that the rationality principl…Read more
  •  1062
    A concept of progress for normative economics
    Economics and Philosophy 22 (1): 19-54. 2006.
    The paper discusses the sense in which the changes undergone by normative economics in the twentieth century can be said to be progressive. A simple criterion is proposed to decide whether a sequence of normative theories is progressive. This criterion is put to use on the historical transition from the new welfare economics to social choice theory. The paper reconstructs this classic case, and eventually concludes that the latter theory was progressive compared with the former. It also briefly …Read more
  •  872
    Choice-Based Cardinal Utility. A Tribute to Patrick Suppes
    Journal of Economic Methodology 23 (3): 268-288. 2016.
    We reexamine some of the classic problems connected with the use of cardinal utility functions in decision theory, and discuss Patrick Suppes's contributions to this field in light of a reinterpretation we propose for these problems. We analytically decompose the doctrine of ordinalism, which only accepts ordinal utility functions, and distinguish between several doctrines of cardinalism, depending on what components of ordinalism they specifically reject. We identify Suppes's doctrine with the …Read more
  •  837
    Does optimization imply rationality?
    Synthese 124 (1-2). 2000.
    The relations between rationality and optimization have been widely discussed in the wake of Herbert Simon's work, with the common conclusion that the rationality concept does not imply the optimization principle. The paper is partly concerned with adding evidence for this view, but its main, more challenging objective is to question the converse implication from optimization to rationality, which is accepted even by bounded rationality theorists. We discuss three topics in succession: (1) ratio…Read more
  •  773
    Whereas many others have scrutinized the Allais paradox from a theoretical angle, we study the paradox from an historical perspective and link our findings to a suggestion as to how decision theory could make use of it today. We emphasize that Allais proposed the paradox as a normative argument, concerned with ‘the rational man’ and not the ‘real man’, to use his words. Moreover, and more subtly, we argue that Allais had an unusual sense of the normative, being concerned not so much with the rat…Read more
  •  737
    Modèle rationnel ou modèle économique de la rationalité?
    Revue Economique 35 (1): 9-63. 1984.
    This article critically discusses the concept of economic rationality, arguing that it is too narrow and specific to encompass the full concept of practical rationality. Economic rationality is identified here with the use of the optimizing model of decision, as well as of expected utility apparatus to deal with uncertainty. To argue that practical rationality is broader than economic rationality, the article claims that practical rationality includes bounded rationality as a particular case, an…Read more
  •  686
    Ranking Multidimensional Alternatives and Uncertain Prospects
    Journal of Economic Theory 157 146-171. 2015.
    We introduce a ranking of multidimensional alternatives, including uncertain prospects as a particular case, when these objects can be given a matrix form. This ranking is separable in terms of rows and columns, and continuous and monotonic in the basic quantities. Owing to the theory of additive separability developed here, we derive very precise numerical representations over a large class of domains (i.e., typically notof the Cartesian product form). We apply these representationsto (1)stream…Read more
  •  631
    On the logic of common belief and common knowledge
    with Luc Lismont
    Theory and Decision 37 (1): 75-106. 1994.
    The paper surveys the currently available axiomatizations of common belief (CB) and common knowledge (CK) by means of modal propositional logics. (Throughout, knowledge- whether individual or common- is defined as true belief.) Section 1 introduces the formal method of axiomatization followed by epistemic logicians, especially the syntax-semantics distinction, and the notion of a soundness and completeness theorem. Section 2 explains the syntactical concepts, while briefly discussing their m…Read more
  •  629
    Duhemian Themes in Expected Utility Theory
    In Anastasios Brenner and Jean Gayon (ed.), French Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 303-357. 2009.
    This monographic chapter explains how expected utility (EU) theory arose in von Neumann and Morgenstern, how it was called into question by Allais and others, and how it gave way to non-EU theories, at least among the specialized quarters of decion theory. I organize the narrative around the idea that the successive theoretical moves amounted to resolving Duhem-Quine underdetermination problems, so they can be assessed in terms of the philosophical recommendations made to overcome these problems…Read more
  •  626
    This paper is concerned with representations of belief by means of nonadditive probabilities of the Dempster-Shafer (DS) type. After surveying some foundational issues and results in the D.S. theory, including Suppes's related contributions, the paper proceeds to analyze the connection of the D.S. theory with some of the work currently pursued in epistemic logic. A preliminary investigation of the modal logic of belief functions à la Shafer is made. There it is shown that the Alchourrron-Gärdenf…Read more
  •  598
    In Richard Bradley’s book, Decision Theory with a Human Face, we have selected two themes for discussion. The first is the Bolker-Jeffrey theory of decision, which the book uses throughout as a tool to reorganize the whole field of decision theory, and in particular to evaluate the extent to which expected utility theories may be normatively too demanding. The second theme is the redefinition strategy that can be used to defend EU theories against the Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, a strategy th…Read more
  •  573
    Social Preference Under Twofold Uncertainty
    with Marcus Pivato
    Economic Theory. forthcoming.
    We investigate the conflict between the ex ante and ex post criteria of social welfare in a new framework of individual and social decisions, which distinguishes between two sources of uncertainty, here interpreted as an objective and a subjective source respectively. This framework makes it possible to endow the individuals and society not only with ex ante and ex post preferences, as is usually done, but also with interim preferences of two kinds, and correspondingly, to introduce interim form…Read more
  •  553
    The Present and Future of Judgement Aggregation Theory. A Law and Economics Perspective
    In Jean-François Laslier, Hervé Moulin, Remzi Sanver & William S. Zwicker (eds.), The Future of Economic Design, Springer. forthcoming.
    This chapter briefly reviews the present state of judgment aggregation theory and tentatively suggests a future direction for that theory. In the review, we start by emphasizing the difference between the doctrinal paradox and the discursive dilemma, two idealized examples which classically serve to motivate the theory, and then proceed to reconstruct it as a brand of logical theory, unlike in some other interpretations, using a single impossibility theorem as a key to its technical development.…Read more
  •  520
    Popper's well-known demarcation criterion has often been understood to distinguish statements of empirical science according to their logical form. Implicit in this interpretation of Popper's philosophy is the belief that when the universe of discourse of the empirical scientist is infinite, empirical universal sentences are falsifiable but not verifiable, whereas the converse holds for existential sentences. A remarkable elaboration of this belief is to be found in Watkins's early work on the s…Read more
  •  509
    The expression "analytic narratives" is used to refer to a range of quite recent studies that lie on the boundaries between history, political science, and economics. These studies purport to explain specific historical events by combining the usual narrative approach of historians with the analytic tools that economists and political scientists draw from formal rational choice theories. Game theory, especially of the extensive form version, is currently prominent among these tools, but there is…Read more
  •  486
    Bayesian Decision Theory and Stochastic Independence
    Philosophy of Science 87 (1): 152-178. 2020.
    As stochastic independence is essential to the mathematical development of probability theory, it seems that any foundational work on probability should be able to account for this property. Bayesian decision theory appears to be wanting in this respect. Savage’s postulates on preferences under uncertainty entail a subjective expected utility representation, and this asserts only the existence and uniqueness of a subjective probability measure, regardless of its properties. What is missing is a …Read more
  •  480
    Factoring Out the Impossibility of Logical Aggregation
    Journal of Economic Theory 141. 2008.
    According to a theorem recently proved in the theory of logical aggregation, any nonconstant social judgment function that satisfies independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) is dictatorial. We show that the strong and not very plausible IIA condition can be replaced with a minimal independence assumption plus a Pareto-like condition. This new version of the impossibility theorem likens it to Arrow’s and arguably enhances its paradoxical value.
  •  474
    Le réalisme des hypothèses et la Partial Interpretation View
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18 (3): 281-325. 1988.
    The article discusses Friedman's classic claim that economics can be based on irrealistic assumptions. It exploits Samuelson's distinction between two "F-twists" (that is, "it is an advantage for an economic theory to use irrealistic assumptions" vs "the more irrealistic the assumptions, the better the economic theory"), as well as Nagel's distinction between three philosophy-of-science construals of the basic claim. On examination, only one of Nagel's construals seems promising enough. It invo…Read more
  •  471
    Les risques majeurs et l'action publique
    with Céline Grislain-Letremy and Reza Lahidji
    La Documentation Française. 2012.
    Par risques majeurs, on entend ceux qui s’attachent à des événements dont les conséquences défavorables, pour l’humanité ou pour l’environnement, sont d’une gravité exceptionnelle. On n’ajoutera ni que ces événements sont d’une intensité physique extrême, ni qu’ils surviennent rarement, car ce n’est pas toujours le cas. Seuls des risques majeurs de nature civile seront considérés dans cet ouvrage, et il s'agira, plus limitativement, de risques naturels, comme ceux d’inondation et de submersion m…Read more
  •  440
    Stochastic independence has a complex status in probability theory. It is not part of the definition of a probability measure, but it is nonetheless an essential property for the mathematical development of this theory. Bayesian decision theorists such as Savage can be criticized for being silent about stochastic independence. From their current preference axioms, they can derive no more than the definitional properties of a probability measure. In a new framework of twofold uncertainty, we intr…Read more
  •  339
    A Welfarist Version of Harsanyi's Theorem
    with Claude D'Aspremont
    In M. Fleurbaey M. Salles and J. Weymark (ed.), Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism, Cambridge University Press. 2008.
    This is a chapter of a collective volume of Rawls's and Harsanyi's theories of distributive justice. It focuses on Harsanyi's important Social Aggregation Theorem and technically reconstructs it as a theorem in welfarist social choice.