A decision maker (DM) may not perfectly maximize her preference over the feasible set. She may feel it is good enough to maximize her preference over a sufficiently large consideration set; or just require that her choice is sufficiently well-ranked (e.g., in the top quintile of options); or even endogenously determine a threshold for what is good enough, based on an initial sampling of the options. Heuristics such as these are all encompassed by a common theory of order-k rationality, which relaxes perfect optimization by only requiring choices from a set S to fall within the set’s top k(S) elements according to the DM’s preference ordering. Heuristics aside, this departure from rationality offers a natural way, in the classic ‘as if’ tradition, to gradually accommodate more choice patterns as k increases. We characterize the empirical content of order-k rationality (and related theories), and provide a tractable testing method which is comparable to the method of checking SARP.

决策者（DM）可能无法完美地最大化其对可行集的偏好。她可能会觉得足够好，可以在足够大的对价范围内最大化自己的偏好。或仅要求她的选择排名足够好（例如，在选择权的前五分之一中）；甚至根据选项的初始样本内生地确定一个足够好的阈值。诸如此类的启发式方法都被通用的k阶合理性理论所涵盖，该理论仅要求集合S的选择落入集合的前k个（S）元素（根据DM的偏好排序）。除了启发式方法，这种偏离理性的方法在经典的“好像”传统中提供了一种自然的方式，可以随着k的增加逐渐适应更多的选择模式。我们表征了k阶合理性（及相关理论）的经验内容，并提供了一种可比拟的检验SARP的简便测试方法。