"But I don’t think that this is what we see. In general it seems like individuals don’t display this pretty weird erratic behaviour and so I don’t think objections to these axioms are particularly strong reasons to reject rational choice modelling. "
In reality, people DO prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. It happens all the time. In fact, this was demonstrated all the way back in 1954: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1909827 and then Kahneman and Tversky made a whole career out of exploiting this type of thing.
There are further issues when trying to extrapolate individual choice to group choice, since transitivity isn't even almost allowed in group decisions. Marquis de Condorcet proved that in the 1700s.
As George Box famously said, all models are wrong, some are useful.
You have to ask yourself if a rational choice model is useful in a given situation. This will generally not be the case, but maybe there are edge cases in which it is.
You're wrong about this point:
"But I don’t think that this is what we see. In general it seems like individuals don’t display this pretty weird erratic behaviour and so I don’t think objections to these axioms are particularly strong reasons to reject rational choice modelling. "
In reality, people DO prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. It happens all the time. In fact, this was demonstrated all the way back in 1954: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1909827 and then Kahneman and Tversky made a whole career out of exploiting this type of thing.
There are further issues when trying to extrapolate individual choice to group choice, since transitivity isn't even almost allowed in group decisions. Marquis de Condorcet proved that in the 1700s.
As George Box famously said, all models are wrong, some are useful.
You have to ask yourself if a rational choice model is useful in a given situation. This will generally not be the case, but maybe there are edge cases in which it is.