Rationality—a global concept

Irwin Lipnowski

pp. 17-32

in: Ken Dennis (ed), Rationality in economics, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

The thesis advanced in this paper is that the traditional concept of rationality embraced by economists is valid and applicable in the most general of settings. Although the determination of rational behavior becomes vastly more complicated once a single-agent deterministic setting is generalized, it is argued that rationality retains it essential meaning: maximization of the degree to which an agent can realize a given objective, as measured by the agent's preference ordering over consequences (or outcomes) in his opportunity set.