Choice as a Dirac Delta: Modelling Decisions as Pulses

Is the act of making a decision a process or a pulse? Critiques of rational choice theory and models often treat cognitive processes of preference ordering as part of the act of deciding that should be incorporated into the models. The failure to account for human psychology, they argue, responds for RCT’s lack of predictability. However, this argument and the models of human mind, such as prospect theory, see decision as a process that begins at the cognitive considerations of preference ordering and extends up to the act of decision. In this paper, I advance the idea that decision is a pulse rather than a process. I argue that making a decision is analogous to the Dirac delta function, which in signal theory represents an unitary pulse. In the exact moment of making a decision, all preferences and contextual evaluations must have been already organised in the agent's mind, otherwise she would not be capable of making the decision. Decision is, thus, a pulse whose value is 1 in t=0  (when the act is performed), and 0 elsewhere across the domain, for making a decision is a single-peaked act. Modelling  decision in these terms avoids the problem of referring to cognitive processes as in psychological accounts of the human mind, and is more efficient in mathematical terms.