Rational economic actor - Finance Records

Rational economic actor - Finance Records

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Â Human Rational Behavior and Economic Rationality

Thus, some economists and rational choice theorists consider this tautological property of un-testability a major advantage of their theory arguing that “there is no need for direct tests of the fundamental postulates in physics [...] or in economics-- the laws of maximizing utility and profit” (Machlup 1963:167).
In the preceding I have detected and discussed the peculiar conception of rational behavior in what is putatively rational choice theory in both economics and sociology, and advanced a corrective in the form of a broader definition and conceptualization of rational behavior as both instrumental, economic or individual and non-instrumental, extra-economic or social.
As such, rational behavior in general is determined by a certain relevant degree of coherence between the subjective meanings or good reasons of the actor and the objective purposes attributed by other actors and/or observers.

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol7.2/02_zafirovski.html (11781 words)

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Â Human Rational Behavior and Economic Rationality

Using rational choice terminology, this incorporation may produce greater benefits than costs, yet the cost is not insignificant insofar as not much is left from an initially unified model predicated on the proverbial same single agent, viz.
Thus, some economists and rational choice theorists consider this tautological property of un-testability a major advantage of their theory arguing that “there is no need for direct tests of the fundamental postulates in physics [...] or in economics-- the laws of maximizing utility and profit” (Machlup 1963:167).
In the preceding I have detected and discussed the peculiar conception of rational behavior in what is putatively rational choice theory in both economics and sociology, and advanced a corrective in the form of a broader definition and conceptualization of rational behavior as both instrumental, economic or individual and non-instrumental, extra-economic or social.

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol7.2/02_zafirovski.html (11781 words)

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Â Some Amendments to Social Exchange Theory: A Sociological Perspective

Ironically, such an actor concept seems closer to homo sociologicus that exchange and other rational choice theorists reject than to homo economicus in the strict sense, as an assumed embodiment of perfect rationality and driven by the ingrained propensity to exchange for maximum gain.
Typically social exchange theory, especially its rational choice version, explains non-economic exchange processes by the operation of homo economicus and other economic laws, especially marginal utility, supply and demand and related market principles (Coleman, 1990; Emerson, 1976; Michener, Cohen, and Sorensen, 1977).
Occasionally, or in post-hoc theory development characteristic of rational choice theory, some exchange theorists admit that social interaction is different from economic transactions by placing it between pure calculation of advantage and pure expression of love (Blau, 1994: 91).

http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol004.002/01_zafirovski.html (10389 words)

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Â Motivation and method

Despite its fundamental importance to economic theory, the notion of the rational economic actor is widely acknowledged to have significant problems.
At the heart of conventional economic theory is the notion of the rational economic actor.
For instance, the theory of economic growth is almost exclusively devoted to the issue of steady state growth in spite of the fact that growth is always unsteady and unbalanced.

http://website.lineone.net/~marc.widdowson/Part2/Chapter11.html (22533 words)

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Â Human Rational Behavior and Economic Rationality

As such, rational behavior in general is determined by a certain relevant degree of coherence between the subjective meanings or good reasons of the actor and the objective purposes attributed by other actors and/or observers.
This implies that economic rationality and the economic system is far from being self-referential vis-à-vis rational behavior and the social system as a whole.
The paper argues that the rational behavior of human agents is far from being invariably utility- and profit-optimizing, and thus cannot be automatically reduced to economic rationality.

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol7.2/02_zafirovski.html (22533 words)

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Â Feminist Economics Homepage

Many feminist economists fault mainstream economic analysis for being "masculinist" Â viewing the economy from the point of view of men's experience, and defining the typical economic actor as "rational economic man." They seek to construct alternative theoretical approaches and economic concepts which include women's experience and feminine values such as caring, cooperation, and provisioning.
Feminist development economists study the impact of globalization on women's lives, and propose development policies which can improve women's economic well-being.
They highlight women's disadvantaged economic position in the labor market and in the household, and analyze gender differences in occupations and earnings.

http://www.wellesley.edu/Economics/matthaei/home_fem.html (304 words)

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Â Doc

The neo-liberal approach to economic development and economic policy, based on methodological individualism, â€˜naturalnessâ€™ of the market and the rational economic actor, was profoundly shaken by events and trends occurring in the global economy (Asian economic crisis, liberalisation of global trade and the Washington Consensus).
The entire economic science is about answering the key question: how limited resources are distributed, allocated and used by people in economy not only at global level but also at macro- (national) level, meso- (sectoral and local community level) and micro-levels (household, company, individual).
Feminist economics is a scientific and theoretic discipline approaching economic issues from a wider social and political standpoint.

http://www.globalizacija.com/doc_en/e0017ram.htm (3688 words)

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Â Rational choice

Though he did not invent the approach, Adam Smith (1723-1790) is considered to be the first to assume a rational man as an economic actor.
Rational choice, as it is expressed in economical analysis, depends on two more specific assumptions.
According to Parkin, a rational choice is the best possible action from the point of view of the person making the choice, given that person’s preferences and given the information available at the time the decision is made (1990, 19).

http://www.hkkk.fi/~teylikos/rational_choice_in_economics.htm (3688 words)

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Â Harvard University Press: The Spirit of Capitalism

A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation, or "spirit," behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was not the liberation of the "rational economic actor," but rather nationalism.
Taking her title from Max Weber's famous study on the same subject, Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity.
The Spirit of Capitalism answers a fundamental question of economics, a question neither economists nor economic historians have been able to answer: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth?

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GRESPI.html (303 words)

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Â Stanford University Center for Latin American Studies

His research interests include public policies toward business, political behavior, legal processes, and rational actor models of public policy formation.
He teaches on antitrust and regulation, the economic approach to politics, and the role and methods of economic policy analysis.
Jonathan Greenberg, Lecturer, is the Director of International Legal Studies at Stanford Law School.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/las/people/affiliates.html (303 words)

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Â Edmund Phelps Home Page

Phelps spent much of the ‘70s replying to a further development from other quarters: to theoretical demonstrations that a departure from the current equilibrium path would be merely momentary if every economic actor had so-called rational expectations.
Phelps was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 1981 and was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2000.
Edmund Phelps joined the Department of Economics at Columbia in 1971 after several years at Pennsylvania and earlier Yale.

http://www.columbia.edu/~esp2 (303 words)

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Â Amitai Etzioni's Vita - Articles

Law and economics scholars tend to use the first elements of each of these pairs (environmental factors, predetermination, and intentional choice) to integrate social norms into their models, to depict the actor as a free agent, and to portray the social order as based on aggregations of voluntary agreements.
The economic model...underestimates the extent to which motivation from enduring group loyalties and values can override changes in the opportunity costs of available choices.
His rule is considered to be rational because he is portrayed as having assumed to have calculated that the costs of checking weather forecasts everyday (and their reliability) are higher than those of carrying the umbrella on rain-free days.

http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/A277.html (303 words)

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Â Zoo Station

In this interview, Herman Daly, an economist of a different ilk, presents a wonderful critique of traditional economics, and how Homo Economicus, the traditional rational, individualistic view of an economic actor, has suffered from not taking into account the environment, and society.
To be sure, Malthus with his views on resource scarcity, and other discussions on externalities such as pollution have indeed brought such topics into the economic mainstream, but still remain marginalized by more conventional views.
These issues lead directly to why the world is facing the problems mentioned above.

http://wetware.blogspot.com/2005/02/irrationality-of-homo-economicus.html (268 words)

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Â Edmund Phelps Home Page

Phelps spent much of the ‘70s replying to a further development from other quarters: to theoretical demonstrations that a departure from the current equilibrium path would be merely momentary if every economic actor had so-called rational expectations.
Phelps was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 1981 and was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2000.
This work helped start what came to be known as New Keynesian macroeconomics.

http://www.columbia.edu/~esp2 (268 words)

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Â Jeffery Paige's Agrarian Revolution

In sociological literature the concern or topic of interest is often called "collective violence." In connection to this, those of neo-classical economic bent have raised the "free rider problem." According to this theory, the rational actor benefits from revolutions created by others, but does not risk revolution him or herself.
Because advanced capitalist countries do not truly assist in economic development of agrarian countries and in fact support elites holding back those countries, Agrarian Revolution is still terribly relevant.
Paige shows that revolution happens in export-agriculture sectors, where agrarian elites find themselves in a zero-sum struggle with peasants by the very nature of the business these elites are in.

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bookstore/books/violence/paige.html (268 words)

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Â Faculty Profile for Kristen R. Monroe

Her narrative analysis of interviews with entrepreneurs, the quintessential rational actors, is contrasted with interviews with philanthropists, recipients of the Carnegie Hero Commission Award, and rescuers of jews in Nazi Europe.
Her current research, focused on rational actor theory and altruism, is explored in two books.
Expanded version printed in THE ECONOMIC APPROACH TO POLITICS.

http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=4880&term_list=monroe (1252 words)

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Â Stanford University Center for Latin American Studies

His research interests include public policies toward business, political behavior, legal processes, and rational actor models of public policy formation.
He teaches on antitrust and regulation, the economic approach to politics, and the role and methods of economic policy analysis.
Jorge Ruffinelli, Professor, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Uruguay in 1973.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/las/people/affiliates.html (3212 words)

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Â George Mason University School of Law Current News: Professor Tullock's New and Collected Works

Tullock and his 1962 coauthor, Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan, are widely recognized as cofounders of public choice, a field that systematically applies the rational choice approach of economics to the analysis of political markets.
Although Tullock does not hold a degree in economics, he is one of the most respected and widely cited economists of the modern age.
Public choice analysts evaluate the impact on political outcomes exercised by voters, special interests, bureaucrats, legislators, and presidents on the assumption that each such actor pursues his own self-interest.

http://www.law.gmu.edu/currnews/tullock-books.html (513 words)

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Â Reviews

And if you looked for a scientific model that reflected these ideas--or the nature of the "rational economic actor" in the discipline of classical economics--you'd have to reach back to the 17th century: Newton's planets rolling in solitary splendour or Boyle's particles in an ideal gas.
Reaganomics needs solipsists of the highest order: you have to be pretty immune to other people's points of view to cut back, for example, funding for education.
The role of government has been eroded until its only functions, it seems, are law and war.

http://www.cyberselfish.com/reviews41.html (513 words)

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Â The Theory of the Leisure Class

Gintis, Herbert Full-text papers and class material covering game theory, the rational actor model in economic theory, experimental economics and anthropology.
Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class: Cover The first and still foremost of the modern attack on wealth.
Home Page of J. Milne Includes preprints and course notes on Group Theory, Fields and Galois Theory, Algebraic Geometry, Algebraic Number Theory,Modular Functions and Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, Abelian Varieties, Etale Cohomology, and Class Field Theory.

http://www.serebella.com/encyclopedia/article-The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class.html (419 words)

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Â Daniel_kahneman

The Cutting Edge of Behavioral Decision Theory : Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have spent their whole lives developing an alternative to the "rational actor" model of human decision.making, the standard of traditional economic theory and the decision sciences...
Great reference material : The book is highly recommendable for those interested in hedonic psychology especially Subjective Well.Being (a...

http://books.mysic.ca/Author/Daniel_Kahneman (419 words)

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Â Amazon.com: Books: Choices, Values, and Frames

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have spent their whole lives developing an alternative to the "rational actor" model of human decision-making, the standard of traditional economic theory and the decision sciences.
Their ideas were received rather well from the start, but in recent years, their alternative, which we can fairly call "behavioral economics" has virtually displaced traditional decision theory as an active research area.
Kahneman and Tversky's compilation of articles in this book is an outstanding exposition of recent advances in cognitive psychology, especially advances associated with prospect theory.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521627494?v=glance (419 words)

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Â BIBLIO

Identifies two ways of thinking about whether and how environmental scarcity contributes to conflict: the rational actor approach, which examines how scarcity influences decision makers, and the causal relationship approach, which focuses on the nature of the hypothesized relationship between the cause (environmental scarcity) and its effect (social conflict).
Downward pull on economic performance from environmental degradation and population pressures leads to frustration, resentment, domestic unrest, and in extreme cases, civil war, making environmental causes an "essential factor" in conflict.
Scarcity and uneven distribution lead to environmental disputes and the frequency of such conflicts is likely to escalate in the future.

http://www.acunu.org/millennium/es-appd.html (419 words)

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Â Michael Anissimov - A Concise Introduction to Heuristics and Biases

One of the foundations of heuristics and biases that challenged the economic "rational actor" model of intuitive human reasoning, risk-aversiveness refers to the fact that losses loom larger than gains.
Heuristics save time and effort, but often fail utterly when presented with data outside of their "domain of expertise".
Dozens of heuristics and biases have been studied extensively and experimentally verified, and hundreds or thousands have been hypothesized.

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/works/heuristicsandbiases.htm (419 words)

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Â Thomas Hobbes -- Moral and Politcal Philosophy [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Many interpreters have presented Hobbesian man as a self-interested, rationally calculating actor (those ideas have been important in modern political philosophy and economic thought, especially in terms of rational choice theories).
And all these divisions cut across one another: for example, the army of the republican challenger, Cromwell, was the main home of the Levellers, yet Cromwell in turn would act to destroy their power within the army’s ranks.
In addition, England’s recent union with Scotland was fragile at best, and was almost destroyed by King Charles I’s attempts to impose consistency in religious practices.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/hobmoral.htm (419 words)

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Â Game classification (game theory)

Gintis, Herbert Full-text papers and class material covering game theory, the rational actor model in economic theory, experimental economics and anthropology.
Evolutionary Game Theory Evolutionary game theory studies equilibria of games played by populations of players, where the "fitness" of players derives from the success each player has playing the game.
Seville Game Theory Group Lots of links on game theory, papers and publications by members and others.

http://www.serebella.com/encyclopedia/article-Game_classification_(game_theory).html (320 words)

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Â Amazon.com: Choices, Values, and Frames: Books: Daniel Kahneman,Amos Tversky

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have spent their whole lives developing an alternative to the "rational actor" model of human decision-making, the standard of traditional economic theory and the decision sciences.
Their ideas were received rather well from the start, but in recent years, their alternative, which we can fairly call "behavioral economics" has virtually displaced traditional decision theory as an active research area.
Amazon.com: Choices, Values, and Frames: Books: Daniel Kahneman,Amos Tversky

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521627494?v=glance (1369 words)