Search

That the rationality of individual people is ‘bounded’ – that is, finite in scope and representational reach, and constrained by the opportunity cost of time – cannot reasonably be controversial as an empirical matter. In this context, the paper addresses the question as to why, if economics is an empirical science, economists introduce bounds on the rationality of agents in their models only grudgingly and partially. The answer defended in the paper is that most economists are interested primarily in markets and only secondarily in the dynamics of individual decisions – specifically, they are interested in these dynamics mainly insofar as they might systematically influence the most useful approaches to modeling interesting markets. In market contexts, bounds on rationality are typically generated by institutional and informational properties specific to the market in question, which arise and are sustained by structural dynamics that do not originate in or reduce to individuals' decisions or psychological dispositions. To be sure, these influencesinteractwith psychological dispositions, so economists have reason to attend to the psychology of valuation. But nogeneralmodel of bounded rationality should ever be expected to feature in the economist's toolkit, regardless of the extent to which psychologists successfully identify specific human cognitive limitations. Use of moderate rational expectations assumptions should be understood in this light. Such assumptions are readily relaxed in specific applications, and in ways customized to modeling circumstances, that modelers, experimentalists, and econometricians are making steadily more sophisticated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soros' theory of reflexivity is meant to apply to a variety of social processes. In economics, it implies that many processes will be subject to “boom-bust” patterns in which expected outcomes deviate for a considerable time from the actual path, and that the actual path in turn deviates from the underlying fundamentals. This is in sharp contrast to the reigning notions in orthodox economics. The hypothesis of Rational Expectations (RE) requires that the views of all participants will converge to a “single set correct of expectations” and the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) posits that actual outcomes deviate from equilibrium in a random manner save for occasional exogenous shocks. In this paper I show that Soros' argument is similar to the classical and Keynesian notions of equilibration as a turbulent process in which actual and expected variables gravitate around some fundamental value. But Soros makes the important further contribution of emphasizing that the fundamental value itself will generally be affected, but not fully determined, by (diverse) expectations and actual outcomes. I demonstrate that Soros' theory of reflexivity can be formalized and that the resulting system is stable in in the sense that expected and actual variables will gravitate around a possibly moving fundamental value. The paper ends with a discussion of an alternate economic paradigm in which the principle of reflexivity would be central. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nature does not care … whether we penetrate her secrets and establish successful theories about her workings and apply these theories successfully in predictions. In the social sciences, the matter is more complicated and in the following fact lies one of the fundamental differences between these two types of theories: the kind of economic theory that isknownto the participant in the economy has an effect on the economy … There is thus a “backcoupling” or “feedback” between the theory and the object of the theory, an interrelation which is definitely lacking in the natural sciences … In this area are great methodological problems worthy of careful analysis.” (Oskar Morgenstern, 1972, p. 707). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implicit links between models containing ordinal variables and their underlying unquantified counterparts that are necessary to make the former viable theoretical constructions. It is argued that when the underlying unquantified structure is unknown, the permissible transformations of scale applicable to the ordinal variables have to be restricted beyond that which is permitted by dint of the ordinality itself. The possibility of an underlying structure being known but unspecified is also considered. In the case of the efficiency wage model, the only usable transformations of the ordinal effort scale are those which are multiples of each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]