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In economics and other social sciences, preference is the ordering of alternatives based on their relative utility, a process which results in an optimal "choice" (whether real or theoretical). The character of the individual preferences is determined purely by taste factors, independent of considerations of prices, income, or availability of goods. With the help of the scientific method many practical decisions of life can be modelled, resulting in testable predictions about human behavior. Although economists are usually not interested in the underlying causes of the preferences in themselves, they are interested in the theory of choice because it serves as a background for empirical demand analysis. == History == In 1926 Ragnar Frisch developed for the first time a mathematical model of preferences in the context of economic demand and utility functions.〔Barten, Anton and Volker Böhm. (1982). "Consumer theory", in: Kenneth Arrow and Michael Intrilligator (eds.) ''Handbook of mathematical economics. Vol. II'', p. 384〕 Up to then, economists had developed an elaborated theory of demand that omitted ''primitive characteristics'' of people. This omission ceased when, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, logical positivism predicated the need of theoretical concepts to be related with observables.〔Gilboa, Itzhak. (2009). (''Theory of Decision under uncertainty'' ). Cambridge: Cambridge university press〕 Whereas economists in the 18th and 19th centuries felt comfortable theorizing about utility, with the advent of logical positivism in the 20th century, they felt that it needed more of an empirical structure. Because binary choices are directly observable, it instantly appealed to economists. The search for observables in microeconomics is taken even further by revealed preference theory. Since the pioneer efforts of Frisch in the 1920s, one of the major issues which has pervaded the theory of preferences is the representability of a preference structure with a real-valued function. This has been achieved by mapping it to the mathematical index called ''utility''. Von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944 book "Games and Economic Behaviour" treated preferences as a formal relation whose properties can be stated axiomatically. These type of axiomatic handling of preferences soon began to influence other economists: Marschak adopted it by 1950, Houthakker employed it in a 1950 paper, and Kenneth Arrow perfected it in his 1951 book "Social Choice and Individual Values".〔(Moscati, Ivan. (2004). "Early Experiments in Consumer Demand Theory )〕 Gérard Debreu, influenced by the ideas of the Bourbaki group, championed the axiomatization of consumer theory in the 1950s, and the tools he borrowed from the mathematical field of binary relations have become mainstream since then. Even though the economics of choice can be examined either at the level of utility functions or at the level of preferences, to move from one to the other can be useful. For example, shifting the conceptual basis from an abstract preference relation to an abstract utility scale results in a new mathematical framework, allowing new kinds of conditions on the structure of preference to be formulated and investigated. Another historical turnpoint can be traced back to 1895, when Georg Cantor proved in a theorem that if a binary relation is ''linearly ordered'', then it is also isomorphically embeddable in the ordered real numbers. This notion would become very influential for the theory of preferences in economics: by the 1940s prominent authors such as Paul Samuelson, would theorize about people actually having weakly ordered preferences.〔Fishburn, Peter. (1994). "Utility and subjective probability", in: Robert Aumann and Sergiu Hart (eds). ''Handbook of game theory. Vol. 2''. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. pp. 1397-1435.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Preference (economics)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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