 One meaning, central to decision theory, is coherence, which is merely the requirement that your commitments not be self-defeating. The subjective Bayesian representation of rational preference over options as inequalities in subjective expected utility delivers coherence by applying a dominance principle to (suitably structured) preferences. A closely related application of dominance reasoning is the minimization of expected loss (or maximization of expected gain in economics) according to a suitable loss function, which may even be asymmetric (Elliott, Komunjer, &amp; Timmermann 2005) or applied to radically restricted agents, such as finite automata (Rubinstein 1986). Coherence and dominance reasoning underpin expected utility theory  (section 1.1),  too.