Rational and irrational ratios

Rational and Irrational Bubbles

"Irrational" searchers and IR-rational researchers

In this article we look at the prescriptions advocated by Web search textbooks in the light of a selection of empirical data of real Web information search processes. We use the strategy of disjointed incrementalism, which is a theoretical foundation from decision making, to focus on how people face complex problems, and claim that such problem solving can be compared to the tasks searchers per...

The Rational and Irrational Minds of Others

When one surveys Professor Carbonell's many and varied research contributions, two more or less constant methodological trends seem to stand out. They are the preference for an integra-tive outlook and insistence on developing computational systems. The integrative outlook stresses the multiplicity of causes in behavior and contributing factors in reasoning. It is a rather difficult position to...

Financial Fragility with Rational and Irrational Exuberance

This article formalizes investor rationality and irrationality, exuberance and apprehension, to consider the implications of belief formation for the fragility of an economy’s financial structure. The model presented generates a financial structure with portfolio linkages that make it susceptible to contagious financial crises, despite the absence of coordination failures. Investors forecast th...

Medicine, ethics and religion: rational or irrational?

Savulescu maintains that our paper, which encourages clinicians to honour requests for "inappropriate treatment" is prejudicial to his atheistic beliefs, and therefore wrong. In this paper we clarify and expand on our ideas, and respond to his assertion that medicine, ethics and atheism are objective, rational and true, while religion is irrational and false.