Necessary and possible preference structures (Q1949016)

The paper is devoted to developing of the preference-based approach to the individual decision making, especially to demand theory, for the situations when the modeling of an agent's preferences as a total preorder (transitive and complete) is not appropriate. The authors suggest modeling such preferences via two binary relations; one of them is the ``necessary preference'' (NP) and the other is the ``possible preference'' (PP). In this pair, called NaP, NP is a partial preorder, and PP is an extension of NP satisfying mixed properties of transitivity and completeness. An NaP preference is characterized by means of the existence of a nonempty family of total preorders, which witness universally each pair in NP and existentially each pair in PP. The problem of representability of an NaP preference is analyzed on the base of the notion ``modal utility representation'' of a pair of binary relations, which is a generalization of the notion of multi-utility representation of a binary relation. All results have a set-theoretical character.