The roles and import of revealed preference theory

More than eighty years after the seminal work of Paul Samuelson, Revealed Preference Theory (RPT) is still a lively area in microeconomics and choice theory. The notion of 'revealed preference' is also much discussed in the philosophy of economics: it is at the center of methodological (on the status of behavioral evidence for choice models) and semantical (on the meaning of the preference concept) debates. The aim of this paper is to propose a clarification of the aims and achievements of RPT, and more specifically of its most salient outcomes, i.e. Revealed Preference Theorems. I shall claim that the main achievement of these results is the completion of two theoretical tasks: the behavioral characterization of choice models based on preferences and related concepts, and the behavioral identification of their primitives. Consequences of this claim for the aforementioned methodological and semantics debates will be explored.