Bounded arbitrage and nearly rational behavior

Abstract

We establish the equivalence between a principle of almost absence of arbitrage opportunities and nearly rational decision-making. The implications of such principle are considered in the context of the aggregation of probabilistic opinions and of stochastic choice functions. In the former a bounded arbitrage principle and its equivalent form as an approximately Pareto condition are shown to bound the difference between the collective probabilistic assessment of a set of states and a linear aggregation rule on the individual assessments. In the latter we show that our general principle of limited arbitrage opportunities translates into a weakening of the McFadden-Richter axiom of stochastic rationality, and gives an upper bound for the minimum distance of a stochastic choice function to another in the class of random utility maximization models.