This paper presents seven ‘theses’ that capture some important theoretical, methodological and empirical trends regarding research on happiness, and, more in general, theoretical economics and policy making. The trends concern: (1) the advent of new neuroscience techniques and the strengthening of existing ones: these are producing sound knowledge on animals’ and people’s brain mechanisms under...

I discuss the rhetorical dimensions of bounded rationality in two different, yet related, contexts, namely in the practice of organizational economists and in Herbert Simon’s key attempts to persuade economists to take bounded rationality seriously, his Ely lecture and his Nobel Prize lecture. I discuss various reasons why Simon failed to convince his contemporaries, among other things, the abs...

This paper proposes an alternative psychological explanation for bounded rationality. According to Herbert Simon, bounded rationality arises from human cognitive limitations. Following the suggestion of institutional economist John R. Commons, I argue that extremes in emotional arousal also contribute to bounded rationality. This idea is formalized and developed using the Yerkes± Dodson law fro...

This paper discusses Herbert A. Simon’s conception of rationality in two of its principal general definitions: bounded rationality and procedural rationality. It ar‐ gues that the latter is the one that better synthesizes the author’s view about rational behavior and that the former fills mainly a critical function. They are complemen‐ tarily used by Simon in this sense. In spite of that, it is...

The received concept of strategic (game-theoretic) rationality is attended by a formidable list of paradoxes, anomalies, and empirical failures. This paper reviews three well-known and problematic decision contexts and diagnoses as a common source of difficulty the failure in the received view of rationality to adequately recognize risk-return tradeoffs. This diagnosis is then supported by comp...

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) within cognitive science (CogSci) necessitates further elaborations on, and modelings of, several indispensable cognitive criteria. We approach this issue by emphasizing the close relation between artificial general intelligence (AGI) and CogSci, and discussing, particularly, “rationality” as one of such indispensable criteria. We give arguments e...

Debates around the assumption of rationality in economic theory abound and are too numerous to be listed here. Traditionally, rationality of a decision maker is captured by a set of (testable) axioms, whose meaning and strength can be discussed. These rationality axioms however do not all have the same status in the sense that they bear on different things. One could actually distinguish three ...

An informal argument shows that common knowledge of rationality implies the iterative elimination of strongly dominated strategies. Rationality here means that players do not play strategies that are strongly dominated relative to their knowledge. We formalize and prove this claim. When by rationality we mean that players do not play strategies that are weakly dominated relative to their knowle...

)w hat is common and di fferent in two great thinkers’ views?rationality of faith is one of the most important issues in contemporary philosophy of religion that most philosophers of religion have discussed it . alvin plantinga and richard swinburne with theistic approach have discussed this subject. swinburne with evidentialist approach concludes that religious belief like every another belief...

This paper studies the rationality of an individual player in sequential games of perfect information played with other players who are not necessarily rational. The paper proposes a set of properties on the choice behavior and shows that they are equivalent to the rationality of an individual player at the initial node independently of the behavioral norm of the other players. Furthermore, I s...