{"pk":28811,"title":"Decisions Against Preferences","subtitle":null,"abstract":"An agent decides against her preferences, if she considersan option x better than another option y but neverthe-less decides to do y. A central tenet of rational choi-ce theory states that individuals do not decide againsttheir preferences, whereby we find two kinds of potentialcounterexamples in the literature: akrasia, also known asweak-willed decisions, and decisions based on so-calleddeontic constraints such as obligations or commitments.While there is some empirical evidence that weak-willedchoices are a real phenomenon, leading scholars in phi-losophy of economics debate whether choices based oncommitments can be counter-preferential. As far as weknow, however, nobody so far has tried to settle this de-bate empirically. This paper contributes to both debatessince we present some empirical evidence that (i) akrasiacan also be strong-willed and (ii) choices made on the ba-sis of commitments can indeed be counter-preferential.We will conclude that people can decide against theirpreferences without being unreasonable.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Counter-Preferential Choice; RationalChoice Theory; Akrasia; Commitments; Empirical Stu-dies."}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3d76c6dw","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Messerli","middle_name":"","last_name":"Michael","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Sheffield","department":""},{"first_name":"Reuter","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kevin","name_suffix":"","institution":"Universitat Bern","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28811/galley/18682/download/"}]}