Preference, Utility & Choice

Primes about ranking and committing among alternatives: preference, expected utility, and marginal utility formalize value; discounting and temporal inconsistency track how valuation shifts over time; social choice, preference heterogeneity, and revealed preference examine how individual orderings aggregate or get inferred from action.

18 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Cost–Benefit Analysis — Evaluate decisions.
• Decision — Committing to one alternative from a set under uncertainty and trade-off, collapsing open deliberation into a chosen path and foreclosing the others.
• Discounting (Present Value) — Present value calculation.
• Expected Utility — Ranking risky options by their probability-weighted utility.
• Marginal Utility — Additional satisfaction.
• Pareto Efficiency — Optimal allocation.
• Parsimony (Occam's Razor) — Prefer simplicity.
• Preference — Agent's ordering over a choice set on some evaluative dimension.
• Preference Heterogeneity and Conflict — Incompatible agent preferences create impasses and partial dissatisfaction.
• Prioritization — Ordering competing claims on finite resources by a value or urgency metric to produce a ranked sequence of action under constraint, making explicit what gets done first and what does not get done at all.
• Rationality — Evaluate beliefs, choices or procedures by how coherently and responsively they connect evidence, reasons, aims, constraints and revision, under an explicit normative standard and information set.
• Revealed Preference — Infer latent value from observed choices rather than stated reports.
• Social Choice — Aggregate many agents' preferences into one collective outcome under a stated rule.
• Stated Preference — Infer an agent's valuation from a solicited report rather than an enacted choice, gaining access to hypothetical or unchosen alternatives at the cost of a cheap, channel-shaped signal.
• Stated–Revealed Preference Gap — A reported preference and behavior under a real choice opportunity systematically diverge, so the mismatch must be analyzed as two differently distorted access channels rather than automatically treating either as the agent's true valuation.
• Temporal Inconsistency and Preference Reversals — Preference orderings reverse as decision horizon approaches.
• Time Preference (Discounting Future) — Present vs future value.
• Utility — Represent the preference value, benefit or desirability of an outcome for a specified agent or evaluative system.