SFI External Professor Herb Gintis remarks on a new paper in Biology Letters that examines decision-making organisms' seemingly irrational violations of the rule of transitivity, or the logical ordering of preferences.
"Gintis explains that the choices only seem to violate transitivity or IIA because there are in fact more than three of them," writes Nature's Philip Ball. "When IIA fails, he says, it's usually because the modeller failed to take into account the probabilities of appearance and disappearance in the range of possible choices."
Read the article in Nature (January 15, 2014)