Abstract
Most conceptions of rationality require that intelligent choices be grounded in beliefs about consequences for personal or collective values. As March (1978) argues, actual human behavior often follows other logics having their own claims to intelligence; nevertheless, the choices that persons, institutions, and societies make are frequently guided by calculations of the benefits and the costs that alternative actions are expected to bring. These calculations involve two kinds of conjectures about the future, conditional on current actions. The first conjecture is a statement of belief about probable future world states; the second is an estimate of probable future expressions of preferences. Those who make the calculations combine the conjectures to produce weighted averages of the values of the identified alternatives, where each weight is a degree of belief that a particular set of consequences will be realized. The expected values that result are supposed to inform the decisionmaker’s choice, though not to absolve him from accountability.
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Crocker, T.D. (1985). Estimates of Acid Deposition Control Benefits: A Bayesian Perspective. In: Mandelbaum, P., Beal, C. (eds) Acid Rain Economic Assessment. Environmental Science Research (closed), vol 33. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-8353-0_8
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