Revealed Preference Argumentation and Applications in Consumer Behaviour Analyses

Abstract

AbstractConsumer preference studies in economics rest heavily on the behavioural interpretation of preference especially in the form of Revealed Preference Theory (RPT). Viewing purchasing decisions as a species of human reasoning, in this paper we are interested in generalising behaviourism to preference-based argumentation where existing frameworks are universally governed by the opposing mentalistic interpretation of preference. Concretely we re-construct and unify two main approaches to RPT then develop a so-called Revealed Preference Argumentation (RPA) framework which identifies preference as observed reasoning behaviour of an agent. We show that RPA subsumes RPT, by showing that key RPT-based consumer analyses can be translated to and solved as RPA computational tasks. It is argued that RPA may pave the way for future applications of argumentation to behavioural economics.