PUBHLTH 139 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Methodological Individualism, Budget Constraint, Mono Lake
29 May 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Cost benefit analysis a systematic approach to estimating the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives that satisfy transactions, activities or functional requirements for a business. It is a technique that is used to determine options that provide the best approach for the adoption and practice in terms of benefits in labor, time and cost savings. The basic premise of rational choice theory is that aggregate social behavior results from the behavior of individual actors, each of whom is making their individual decisions. The theory therefore focuses on the determinants of the individual choices (methodological individualism). Rational choice theory then assumes that an individual has preferences among the available choice alternatives that allow them to state which option they prefer. The goal of rational analysis as a research program is to explain the function and purpose of cognitive processes and to discover the structure of the mind.
