What Are Axiomatizations Good For?
Résumé
In light of the interest in axiomatic models of decision making in recent years, one is led to ask, in what ways do the axiomatic deriva- tions advance economics? If economists are interested in predicting how people behave, without a pretense to change individual decision making, how can they benefit from representation theorems, which are no more than equivalence results? We address this question, propose several ways in which representation results can still be useful, and discuss their potential implications to axiomatic decision theory.