Elicitation of Preferences

Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behaviour, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behaviour. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.