Till Grüne
London School of Economics and Political Science
However extensive and important the use of pairwise preference comparisons, expressions of such comparisons are often difficult to interpret, due to their implicit contextual assumptions. Understanding and criticism of seemingly unusual preference statements as `I prefer to be poor over being wealthy', I argue, can be put on a firm basis by interpreting them holistically: by connecting them to an underlying preference relation over worlds. Constructing the connection, I further argue, means to make the contextual assumptions explicit. A model of such a connection based on causation is offered, and the properties of a preference relation thus defined are proven.