Beyond rationality: The content of preferences

The BDT literature has largely focused on demonstrations of violations of rationality (i.e. consistency) in individual decision making and has had little to say about the content of preferences. While researchers concluded that inconsistency implied preferences were constructed, some went so far as to presume that since preferences are constructed, substantive preferences do not exist prior to their revelation. In other words, they extended the findings that individuals do not always know exactly what they want to imply that consumer's do not have any substantive preferences. This clearly overstepped the bounds of the evidence, which was agnostic toward the existence of reasonably stable substantive preferences. We applaud Simonson for calling attention to this point. While we do not believe that Simonson's “inherent preferences” lead to preference orders that behave any more rationally or consistently than those studied in the BDT literature, we nevertheless join him in his call for further research into the content of preferences and make a variety of suggestions about where that research will bear most fruit.