Inferential Choice Theory *

Despite being the fundamental primitive of the study of decision-making in economics, choice correspondences are not observable: even for a single menu of options, we observe at most one choice of an individual at a given point in time, as opposed to the set of all choices she deems most desirable in that menu. However, it may be possible to observe what a person chooses from a feasible menu at various times, repeatedly. We propose a method of inferring the choice correspondence of an individual from this sort of choice data. First, we derive our method axiomatically, assuming an ideal dataset. Next, we develop statistical techniques to implement this method for real-world situations where the sample is often small. As an application, we use the data of a famed choice experiment from the literature to infer choice correspondences.

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