Is the act of making a decision a process or pulse? Critiques of rational choice theory and models often treat cognitive processes of preference ordering as part of the act of decision that should be incorporated into the models. The failure to account for human psychology, they argue, responds for RCT’s lack of predictability. However, this argument and the models of human mind, such as prospect theory, see decision as a process that begins at the cognitive considerations of preference ordering and extends up to the act of decision. In this paper, I argue that decision is analogous to a pulse rather than a process. I draw this analogy with the Dirac delta function, which in signal theory represents an unitary pulse. In the exact moment of making a decision, all preferences and contextual evaluations must have been already structured in the agent’s mind, otherwise she would not be capable of making the decision. Acknowledging the pulse-like nature of rational choice models allows modellers to eschew the incorporation of complex cognitive processes into their analyses, which has both theoretical and empirical implications to RCT’s representation of real-world phenomena.

中文翻译：

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理性选择理论中决策的脉冲性质

做出决定的行为是过程还是脉搏？理性选择理论和模型的批评通常将偏好排序的认知过程视为应纳入模型的决策行为的一部分。他们认为，未能解释人类心理是 RCT 缺乏可预测性的原因。然而，这一论点和人类思维模型，如前景理论，将决策视为一个从偏好排序的认知考虑开始并延伸到决策行为的过程。在本文中，我认为决策类似于脉冲而不是过程。我用狄拉克 delta 函数进行类比，它在信号理论中代表单一脉冲。在做出决定的那一刻，所有偏好和上下文评估都必须已经在座席的脑海中形成，否则她将无法做出决定。承认理性选择模型的脉冲性质允许建模者避免将复杂的认知过程纳入他们的分析，这对 RCT 对现实世界现象的表示具有理论和经验意义。