June 2010

IZA DP No. 5005: Moody Choice

revised version published as 'State Dependent Choice' in: Social Choice and Welfare, 2015, 45 (2), 239-268

If choices depend on the decision maker's mood, is the attempt to derive any consistency in choice doomed? In this paper we argue that, even with full unpredictability of mood, the way choices from a menu relate to choices from another menu exhibits some structure. We present two alternative models of 'moody choice' and show that, in either of them, not all choice patterns are possible. Indeed, we characterise both models in terms of consistency requirements of the observed choice data.