PREFERENCE AND VALUE: LOGICAL SEPARATION OF CONCEPTS USED IN THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
PREFERENCE AND VALUE: LOGICAL SEPARATION OF CONCEPTS USED IN THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMIC THEORY

Summary/Abstract: Present-day economic literature rooted in praxeological tradition (or Austrian economics) generally uses terms “preference” and “subjective value” as synonyms. Both are ways of expressing the idea of a subjective ordinal scale reflecting the fact that an acting individual (actor) compares some things an chooses the thing that is better from her subjective point of view. The fact that there are such comparisons is one of the logical premises of the theory. I try to show in this paper that there are two kinds of valuations in economic theory, that they are logically independent from one another and that they are subject to rather different logical principles. I propose to use terms preference and (subjective) value to denote these logically separate kinds of valuation, although I am not insistent on this wording.

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