Monday, May 5, 2008

Microeconomics: Bounded Rationality

I've read a few journal articles that keep mentioning the term 'bounded rationality' somewhere, and I have wondered for the longest time what that actually is! If I read correctly, it's basically that in classical economics, we have assumed economic agents as having perfect rationality - they will not do anything that would violate their preference ordering, etc, basically being perfect, non-contradictory, always utility maximising in their choices. Of course, such a perfect agent does not exist in reality. Consequently, there have been people (whose names have slipped my mind for the moment, sorry!) who pointed this out and then developed models for bounded rationality - accounting for the fact that economic agents are not perfectly rational. Have a wiki at 'bounded rationality' here or check out this reading about modeling bounded rationality by Ariel Rubinstein here.

No comments: