fatvegan

I have to understand how transitivity works for the project I'm currently doing for work. Luckily it isn't very tricky. Preference transitivity is the assumption that if you think an orange is better than an apple and a pear is better than an orange, then you would also choose to have a pear over an apple.

Economists basically accept the principle of transitivity as an unequivocally reasonable assumption, but there are some others who say it's controversial. They present some theoretical arguments against it. But the only arguments I've found require you to approximate virtual or observed indifference as perfect indifference. One example is to think about how many grains of sugar you might want in your coffee. You're indifferent between one grain and two grains and you're indifferent between 999 grains and 1000 grains, but you would definitely rather have 1 grain than 1000 grains.

It comes down to the definition of indifference and I'd suggest that there is no such thing as perfect indifference between two different things. Sometimes we observe "indifference" because our ability to evaluate the alternatives is too crude, but it strikes me that this is more an issue of measurement than preferences.

All I'm saying is that, for once, I agree with the economists. I think assuming that preferences are transitive is fine.