Justifiable choice

Most existing decision-making models assume that choice behavior is based on preference maximization even when the preferences are incomplete. In this paper we study an alternative approach – “justifiable choice”: each agent has several preference relations (“justifications”), and she can use each justification in every choice problem. We present a new behavioral property that requires an alternative to be chosen if it is not inferior to all mixtures of chosen alternatives, and show that this property characterizes justifiable choice. The main application of this property yields a multiple-utility representation, which substantially differs from existing related representations. In addition, we obtain a multiple-prior representation, and study the notions of indecisiveness and being more decisive.