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The shift from rationalistic to behavioral accounts of human action in geography has entailed a radical change in our accounts of spatial choice. It is now a commonplace that in many non-prescriptive contexts a probabilistic and psychologically-based epistemology of choice is preferable to the deterministic account provided by classic consumer theory. This transition has not been accompanied by explicit methodological discussion of the profoundly different mathematical structures underlying algebraic and probabilistic choice. The contrast has been explicitly dealt with in the literatures of economics and psychology² as well as geographically-oriented discussions.³ One context in which the implications of probabilistic choice urgently require clarification is revealed preference analysis of destination choice in shopping travel. Central place theory and market area analysis provide our most elaborate theoretical models of this behavior. Both espouse an algebraic account of individual choice. Both at least in their classic "un-map-transformed" versions compare unfavorably in descriptive ability with the Huff model⁴ which is simple and atheoretical, but probabilistic. Presumably, progress in the study of probabilistic individual choice will lead to theoretically explicit structures which at least equal the Huff model in descriptive power.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9394-5_14

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