The rationality of rational fools - The role of commitments, persons and agents in rational choice modeling

Subjective payoffs that represent given preferences "all things considered" together with strictly uncommitted opportunity taking cannot account for the behavior of personal actors. It is shown how agent based approaches can explicitly capture internal commitments of persons while sticking to conventional utility cum probability representations of desires and beliefs. However, if rational choice modeling is taken to this extreme, conventional analyses in terms of reasoning become implausible since sub-personal agents are not persons endowed with higher cognitive faculties. Starting from preference representations without looking into the black box of mental processes will hinder theoretical progress.