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Money Pumps

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Jordan Howard Sobel
Jordan Howard Sobel*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Humanities Division, University of Toronto at Scarborough, 1245 Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada M1C 1A4.
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Extract

After maintaining in (Sobel 1997) that certain cyclical preferences can be reasonable, the following questions were tabled: “in what circumstances and under what assumptions … these … preferences of George's would turn him into a ”money pump,” and in what circumstances and under what assumptions they would not do that.” (47) Two pumps afford answers. George, who is sufficiently reasonable and well-informed to use backward induction, has, for this reason, nothing to fear from the first pump, but the second, of a nonstandard design by Wlodek Rabinowicz, ruins him just because he is subject to the constraints of backward induction. Could he be helped by extending his options from actions in a single round, to courses of actions starting in that round? Possibly not. He would be safe if he were capable of resolute choices of couses of action. Even so, he is in trouble through no fault of his, if, as I think, not having that capacity, though a misfortune, is not a fault.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 2001 , pp. 242 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

In addition to Harper, Rabinowicz, and Kyburg, thanks go to Paul Weirich and Jeff Pelletier, and to John Broome and Sven Danielson, fellow fellows of The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences during 1997–8, in the congenial environs of which work on this paper proceeded.

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