Changing preferencesis a phenomenonoften invoked but rarely properlyaccounted for. Throughout the history of the social sciences, researchers have come against the possibility that their subjects’ preferenceswere affected by the phenomenato be explainedor by otherfactorsnot taken into accountin the explanation.Sporadically, attempts have been made to systematically investigate these in uences, but none of these seems to have had a lasting impact. Today we are still not much further with respect to preference change than we were at the middle of the last century. This anthology hopes to provide a new impulse for research into this important subject. In particular, we have chosen two routes to amplify this impulse. First, we stress the use of modellingtechniquesfamiliar from economicsand decision theory. Instead of constructing complex, all-encompassing theories of preference change, the authors of this volume start with very simple, formal accounts of some possible and hopefully plausible mechanism of preference change. Eventually, these models may nd their way into larger, empirically adequate theories, but at this stage, we think that the most importantwork lies in building structure.Secondly,we stress the importance of interdisciplinary exchange. Only by drawing together experts from different elds can the complex empirical and theoretical issues in the modelling of preference change be adequately investigated.
The fact that preferences change is a pressing but unresolved problem for philosophy and the social sciences. Social scientists use preferences to explain agents’ behaviour; philosophers use preferences to explicate value judgements. A lot of empirical research is invested into identifying people’s preferences. However, the success of these endeavours is seriously threatened, because precise accounts of when and why preferences change are lacking.
This volume answers to this need by collecting new essays from an interdisciplinary group of experts in the field. These essays, especially written for this volume, survey the newest approaches to preference change developed in the social sciences and in philosophy, and will serve as a platform for future research. They review some standard material, including the neoclassical preference model and doxastic preference change, time preferences and the debate over policy evaluation under preference change. However, the focus is on new research that is not widely known, such as conditional utilities, non-monotonic logics, complex systems models, inter-temporal choice approaches, etc.
The book serves three purposes. It introduces undergraduate students to the current state of research on preference change, it gives graduate students and researchers in-depth insights into the state-of-the-art modelling techniques of different disciplines; and it points out to experts the lacunae in the literature and directions for future research.
