Reasoning about rationality

Reasoning about rationality

We provide a sound and complete axiomatization for a class of logics appropriate for reasoning about the rationality of players in games, and show that essentially the same axiomatization applies to a very wide class of decision rules. We also consider epistemic representations of games in which players may be uncertain as to what decision rules their opponents are using, and define in this con...

Practical Reasoning and Rationality

Reasoning, rationality, and architectural resolution

Recent evidence suggests that performance on reasoning tasks may reflect the operation of a number of distinct cognitive mechanisms and processes. This paper explores the implications of this view of the mind for the descriptive and normative assessment of reasoning. I suggest that descriptive questions such as "Are we equipped to reason using rule X?" and normative questions such as "Are we ra...

Bounded Reasoning: Rationality or Cognition∗

Bounded reasoning about rationality can have important implications for behavior. These bounds are typically viewed as an artifact of limits in the ability to engage in interactive reasoning, i.e., to reason through “I think, you think, I think, etc ...” However, in principle, these bounds need not be determined by limits in ability. This paper develops a novel identification strategy to show t...

Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality

The type of rationality we assume in economics--perfect, logical, deductive rationality--is extremely useful in generating solutions to theoretical problems. But it demands much of human behavior--much more in fact than it can usually deliver. If we were to imagine the vast collection of decision problems economic agents might conceivably deal with as a sea or an ocean, with the easier problems...