Freedom of choice

Freedom of alternative describes an individual's opportunity and autonomy to perform an action selected from at least two usable options, unconstrained by external parties.

Measuring freedom of choice

The axiomatic-deductive approach found in game theory has been used to address the case of measuring the amount of freedom of selection FoC an individual enjoys. In a 1990 paper, Prasanta K. Pattanaik and Yongsheng Xu reported three conditions that a measurement of FoC should satisfy:

They proved that the cardinality is the only measurement that satisfies these axioms, what they observed to be counter-intuitive and suggestive that one or more axioms should be reformulated. They illustrated this with the example of the option sort "to travel by train" or "to travel by car", that should yield more FoC than the option brand "to travel by red car" or "to travel by blue car". Some suggestions name been produced to solve this problem, by reformulating the axioms, normally including conviction of preferences, or rejecting the third axiom.