?Ranking Opportunity Sets: Freedom of Choice and Cost of Information?

NEME A. NIETO J. AND QUINTAS L.

Anales de la 28 JAIIO

Nueva editorial

Año: 1999 p. 77 - 95

We describe and characterize some orderings on the power set of a given set of basic opportunities. The preference for opportunity sets exhibits some flexibility property (more available alternatives is better) . There is also some cost for inspecting large opportunity sets. We deal with a model where both the quantity and the quality of the alternatives is taken into account. When comparing two opportunity sets we decide one to be better than the other by a lexicographic comparison of alternatives of each set starting by the best alternatives and then looking successively to the second-best , third-best , etc.; but in our point of view at some stage of the choice procedure having more alternatives available will be worse off. We find that if the decision procedure satisfies certain axioms that presumably capture the two forces involved, then the decision maker is using a leximax evaluation procedure up to certain number of alternatives.