The paper provides an brief overview of the “state of the art” in the theory of rational decision making since the 1950’s, and focuses specially on the evolutionary justification of rationality. It is claimed that this justification, and more generally the economic methodology inherited...

The paper develops a theory of biases in decision making. Discovering a strategy for solving a game is a complex problem that may be solved by decomposition; a player decomposing a problem into many simple sub-problems may easily identify the optimal solution to each sub-problem: however it is...

By illuminating the philosophical roots of the various notions of knowledge employed by economists, this Handbook helps to disentangle conceptual and typological issues surrounding the debate on knowledge amongst economists. Wide-ranging in scope, it explores fundamental aspects of the...

Replying to Queen Elizabeth II who in November 2008 asked why so few economists had warned about the emerging financial crisis, a group of eminent economists of the British Academy, claimed that while this failure had many causes, the most important was principally a failure of the collective...

Despite the great effort that has been dedicated to the attempt to redefine expected utility theory on the grounds of new assumptions, modifying or moderating some axioms, none of the alternative theories propounded so far had a statistical confirmation over the full domain of applicability....

This working paper reports the main lines of discussion that developed during a four-day workshop held August 10-13, 1995, at the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The workshop was devoted to exploring the difficulties and promise of current research on organizational routines and...