We consider a consumer who is confused about the best choice.

The consumer contemplates what would have been a better one after going over a lot of choices and this makes him unhappy.

For various reasons, consumer is unable to take into consideration all the attributes of the choices.

He may ignore some of the attributes completely or consider them sequentially.

This kind of behavior is manifested in lexicographic preferences.

This paper characterizes a general class of lexicographic preferences with a new set of axioms on the product topological space of attributes where each attribute is a topological space generated by a linear order. The classes of preferences that the paper characterizes are semi-lexicographic and uniformly semi-lexicographic. Specifically, a transitive uniformly semi-lexicographic preference is lexicographic. We also provide behavioral motivations for our axioms.

Lexicographic preferences

Maximizers

Satisficing

Order topology

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