Written in an informal way, this book is addressed to philosophers or cognitive scientists curious of how economics deals with cognition and to graduate students in economics eager to discover how economics evolves. It aims at extending the framework of game theory in order to better fit with the results of rapidly increasing laboratory experiments concerned with individual choices and collective interactions.
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology –each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history – Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.
Economics, dealing with mental processes of decision makers is part of cognitive science; conversely, cognitive science, faced with constraints on information processing, is part of economics. In July 1990, the Cecoia 2 conference was organised in Paris to further explore the connections between the two. The papers presented in this volume illustrate this truly interdisciplinary research intertwining social and cognitive sciences. Three main topics are represented: agent's mental representation when facing complex uncertainty; agent's computational constraints leading to bounded rationality; agent's learning and evolution in an imperfectly known environment.
Classical microeconomics is intended to explain how a price system is able to coordinate the economic agents. But even if it can be extended to incomplete information and externalities, it remains grounded on very heroic assumptions. Agents are endowed with a very strong rationality, equilibrium is stated without a concrete process to achieve it, market is the unique institution considered. Evolutionary microeconomics is aimed at bypassing these limitations by considering a dynamic approach, however not biologically oriented. Agents have local information and bounded rationality, they are involved in explicit processes of interactions through time, various institutions sustain the market or substitute to it. It explains then some phenomena hardly explained by classical microeconomics: dispersion of prices, variety of industrial structures, financial bubbles.
Economics, dealing with mental processes of decision makers is part of cognitive science; conversely, cognitive science, faced with constraints on information processing, is part of economics. In July 1990, the Cecoia 2 conference was organised in Paris to further explore the connections between the two. The papers presented in this volume illustrate this truly interdisciplinary research intertwining social and cognitive sciences. Three main topics are represented: agent's mental representation when facing complex uncertainty; agent's computational constraints leading to bounded rationality; agent's learning and evolution in an imperfectly known environment.
Written in an informal way, this book is addressed to philosophers or cognitive scientists curious of how economics deals with cognition and to graduate students in economics eager to discover how economics evolves. It aims at extending the framework of game theory in order to better fit with the results of rapidly increasing laboratory experiments concerned with individual choices and collective interactions.
Classical microeconomics is intended to explain how a price system is able to coordinate the economic agents. But even if it can be extended to incomplete information and externalities, it remains grounded on very heroic assumptions. Agents are endowed with a very strong rationality, equilibrium is stated without a concrete process to achieve it, market is the unique institution considered. Evolutionary microeconomics is aimed at bypassing these limitations by considering a dynamic approach, however not biologically oriented. Agents have local information and bounded rationality, they are involved in explicit processes of interactions through time, various institutions sustain the market or substitute to it. It explains then some phenomena hardly explained by classical microeconomics: dispersion of prices, variety of industrial structures, financial bubbles.
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology –each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history – Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.
Based around the image of a carousel, this book uses epistemological theory to tackle the paradoxical acceleration and deceleration of time that is experienced by many. The consequence of this paradox is the observance of the past, present and future coinciding, where acceleration is combined with perfect immobility. The Carousel of Time proposes a model that focuses on a complex network of individual actors, and their relation to the analysis, structure and evolution of our socio-cognitive space–time. The first part of the book, "Foundations", presents the key bases of this model, as well as the notions that must be understood and integrated. The book then analyzes the concept of "Space", defining the parameters of the network’s boundaries, and finishes with an exploration of "Time". This third part links the temporality of the network to its spatial characteristics and studies its evolution.
axiomatic results should be at the heart of such a science. Through them, we should be able to enlighten and scientifically assist decision-making processes especially by: - making that wh ich is objective stand out more c1early from that which is less objective; - separating robust from fragile conc1usions; - dissipating certain forms of misunderstanding in communication; - avoiding the pitfall of illusory reasoning; - emphasizing, once they are understood, incontrovertible results. The difficulties I encountered at the begining of my career as an operations researcher, and later as a consultant, made me realize that there were some limitations on objectivity in decision-aiding. In my opinion, five major aspects must be taken into consideration: 1) The borderline (or frontier) between what is and what is not feasible is often fuzzy. Moreover, this borderline is frequently modified in light of what is found from the study itself. 2) In many real-world problems, the "decision maker D" does not really exist as a person truly able to make adecision. Usually, several people (actors or stakeholders) take part in the decision process, and it is important not to confuse the one who ratifies adecision with the so-called decision maker in the decision ai ding process. This decision maker is in fact the person or the set of persons for whom or in the name of whom decision aiding effort is provided.
This introduction to institutional economics, follows the history of the field since the early 20th century until the present day. It concentrates on influential authors in the main schools of institutional economics. Institutional economics is defined as economic thought that considers institutions to be relevant for economic theory, and consequently criticizes the neoclassical mainstream for having pushed them out of the discipline; it deals specially with the nature, the origin, the change of institutions, and their effects on economic performance. It is a family of different theories that were initially influential in economics, then lost much of their weight in the middle half of the 20th century, and eventually recovered significant creative vitality and impact in the last twenty years. The book puts the recent developments in historical perspective by showing how important themes like the importance of habits, the role of formal and informal rules, the relation of organizations and institutions, the hierarchy and complementarity of institutions, the evolutionary character of institutional change, have been explored by various authors or schools.
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