Your argument there is specious - tempting to see an implied point but on closer inspection doesn’t hold up. Only your first link about phones reveals any preference in the economic sense, and it’s irrelevant to this article. Your link about social media does not demonstrate the economic concept of revealed preference at all, since the subjects aren’t making an exclusive choice, they can and do use multiple sites, since social media doesn’t cost money, and since these are sites with very different social functions. It doesn’t make sense to ask whether kids prefer YouTube to WhatsApp, it’s like asking whether you prefer eating broccoli to playing piano to people who do both.
> There is a revealed preferences of use vs non use.
If you,
scarface_74, are locked in a cell and fed rotten food, and you choose to eat it instead of starve, it means you like it, right? You've revealed your preference for rotten food, so I shouldn't listen to you when you say you don't like it.
I think you should explain yourself more clearly. It really feels like you're trying to paper over specious argument with vagueness.
I scarface_74, removed Facebook from my phone, never used TikTok, deleted my Reddit account, never used Instagram, and only use LinkedIn when im actively looking for a job.
No, that’s incorrect. Revealed preference theory applies only to purchases, not to non purchases, and not to whether to purchase.
Revealed preference theory is tenuous at best*, and you are making incorrect assumptions and broadly misapplying it onto something that is unsupported and unjustified.
You are trading your time for some good or service. Whether it’s free or not is irrelevant. If I said I don’t like Truth Social. But I’m always on it, what does that tell you?
> If I said I don’t like Truth Social. But I’m always on it, what does that tell you?
Let's not play that game anymore. Be clear. What do you think that's supposed to tell me? Flip your question around: If I said I don’t like Truth Social. But I’m always on it, what conclusion would you infer from that?
>>> The same - your “revealed preference” is different from your “stated preference”.
> It tells me that you really like Truth Social and I shouldn’t believe what you say - you “revealed” your true “preference”
That's what I thought you where thinking. Thank you for at least not beating around the bush anymore.
You're wrong though, and you're thinking about this too simplistically. Yours is one possible interpretation, but not the only one, and not necessarily the right one or even a likely one. The discrepancy between "revealed preference" and "stated preference," only gives you the barest scrap of information. You're jumping to conclusions when you go from that scrap to "you really like X" and "I shouldn’t believe what you say." With the information in the scenario you outlined, about as much as you can reasonably infer is "you can tolerate Truth Social."
It's just like my scenario with the prison cell and the rotten food: if you eat it, it doesn't mean you "really like" it and "I shouldn’t believe what you say." It means you can tolerate it and you have a desire to avoid a negative outcome (starvation) that trumps whatever disgust you feel eating it.
tl;dr: complex and ambivalent feelings are a real and common phenomenon that you should consider.
Wrong. Trading time for a good or service is simply not what the revealed preferences theory has evidence to demonstrate. You are jumping to a baseless conclusion. If it’s free, it’s not covered in revealed preference theory, by definition.
Maybe because revealed preference study came out before people could endlessly get services for free?
Are you really saying it’s stretch that when people say one thing and do another, what they do is more indicative of their preferences than what they say?
Revealed preference theory depends on the spending of money as the signal. That is the theory. It simply does not apply to free things. You’re trying to invent some other theory, for which you’re going to need to justify some other way. Revealed preference theory does not apply the way you’d like it to, and does not support your implied claims in this thread.
You can say and do and give your own credence to whatever you want, but the evidence you are providing repeatedly is that you don’t understand what the economic concept of revealed preference actually is.
If you did understand what revealed preference theory is trying to do, and how, then you’d understand why your “simple English” rhetorical question isn’t asking a useful or economically valid question.
Who said anything about a study? No study is needed to see that you obviously don’t understand what revealed preference means, you are contradicting the definition of the economic term.
Take your question. The reason someone might do something different from what they said could be due to anything, such as constraints like cost, time, or availability. It could be due to changing circumstances, or someone else’s preferences. Any given answer to your question cannot be used to infer anything about preference, and assuming it does means you’re not thinking scientifically.
Revealed preference theory is trying to demonstrate what can be proven about preference, which is why it requires a situation where someone spends money on a mutually exclusive choice between two things that are close enough to be an apples to apples comparison. If you don’t do that, then you’re fooling yourself about what the data means.
