impengo's Journal: Ranking and Rational Economics:

The people who advocate for a mindless invisible hand, and cry that greed is good and one cannot moraly fail to maximize profit depend, for all their arguments to work, on RANKING. This means that in a list of Political candidates or Economic items, I MUST be able to say with confidence that I value, say, an anti-abortion stance over a gay-marriage stance in some ranked order of preference. The reason I do not believe that ranking works for me is encapuslated in the web site: http://www.hotornot.com/ Here one is invited to rank the appearance of various women and men, on a one to ten scale. What I find to happen to me personally, is that when the person I look at first is very attractive, I rank the next person lower than I would rank the very same person, if the person I look at first is very un-attractive. Since I am not confident of ranking, I am not a rational economist.