Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Trade and wages
- 2 Politics and trade policy
- 3 Economic analysis of political institutions: an introduction
- 4 Game-theoretic models of market structure
- 5 Rationality and knowledge in game theory
- 6 Experiments and the economics of individual decision making under risk and uncertainty
- 7 Theory and experiment in the analysis of strategic interaction
- 8 Evolutionary game theory in economics
- 9 Learning from learning in economics
- Index
9 - Learning from learning in economics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- 1 Trade and wages
- 2 Politics and trade policy
- 3 Economic analysis of political institutions: an introduction
- 4 Game-theoretic models of market structure
- 5 Rationality and knowledge in game theory
- 6 Experiments and the economics of individual decision making under risk and uncertainty
- 7 Theory and experiment in the analysis of strategic interaction
- 8 Evolutionary game theory in economics
- 9 Learning from learning in economics
- Index
Summary
The process of learning,
of the growth of subjective knowledge,
is always fundamentally the same.
It is imaginative criticism.
(Karl Popper (1979), p. 148)INTRODUCTION
Learning and evolutionary theory in economics are two related research fields that have experienced exponential growth in the last five years. In a sense, this renewed interest in learning theory seems unjustified: the main questions beings addressed are not new. Nash himself wondered how agents would reach the equilibrium he proposed; Muth thought of the rational expectations hypothesis as an extreme counterpart to concurrent macroeconomic models with naive expectations formation, to mention two pioneer examples. In this chapter I review some of the recent contributions to learning theory in games and macroeconomic models. Such a closer look reveals that even if the old questions have not yet been fully answered and it remains difficult - if not impossible - to set a dividing line between rational and adaptive behavior, a theory of the learnable in economics is on its way.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and ApplicationsSeventh World Congress, pp. 278 - 315Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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