Author: Cristina Bicchieri Publisher: CUP Archive ISBN: 9780521574440 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
. This major new book will be of particular interest not only to philosophers but to decision theorists, political scientists, economists, and researchers in artificial intelligence.
Author: Michael Suk-Young Chwe Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691158282 Category : Mathematics Languages : en Pages : 152
Book Description
"Why do beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge. Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. Members must have knowledge of each other, knowledge of that knowledge, and so on. Michael Chwe applies this insight, with striking erudition, to analyze a range of rituals across history and cultures. He shows that public ceremonies are powerful not simply because they transmit meaning from a central source to each audience member but because they let audience members know what other members know. In a new afterword, Chwe delves into new applications of common knowledge, both in the real world and in experiments, and considers how generating common knowledge has become easier in the digital age." -- From the jacket.
Author: Christopher McMahon Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521011785 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
"This book examines the issue of rational cooperation, especially cooperation between people with conflicting moral commitments. The first part considers how the two main aspects of cooperation - the choice by a group of a particular cooperative scheme and the decision by each member to contribute to that scheme - can be understood as guided by reason. The second part explores how the activity of reasoning itself can take a cooperative form. The book is distinctive in offering an account of what people can accomplish by reasoning together, of the role of deliberation in democratic decision making, and of the negotiation of the proper use of concepts. Presenting for the first time a detailed analysis of the general problem of cooperation and collective reasoning between people with different moral commitments, this book will be of particular interest to philosophers of the social sciences and to students in political science, sociology and economics." --Cambridge Press.
Author: Alan Kirman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136941673 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 366
Book Description
The economic crisis is also a crisis for economic theory. Most analyses of the evolution of the crisis invoke three themes, contagion, networks and trust, yet none of these play a major role in standard macroeconomic models. What is needed is a theory in which these aspects are central. The direct interaction between individuals, firms and banks does not simply produce imperfections in the functioning of the economy but is the very basis of the functioning of a modern economy. This book suggests a way of analysing the economy which takes this point of view. The economy should be considered as a complex adaptive system in which the agents constantly react to, influence and are influenced by, the other individuals in the economy. In such systems which are familiar from statistical physics and biology for example, the behaviour of the aggregate cannot be deduced from the behaviour of the average, or "representative" individual. Just as the organised activity of an ants’ nest cannot be understood from the behaviour of a "representative ant" so macroeconomic phenomena should not be assimilated to those associated with the "representative agent". This book provides examples where this can clearly be seen. The examples range from Schelling’s model of segregation, to contributions to public goods, the evolution of buyer seller relations in fish markets, to financial models based on the foraging behaviour of ants. The message of the book is that coordination rather than efficiency is the central problem in economics. How do the myriads of individual choices and decisions come to be coordinated? How does the economy or a market, "self organise" and how does this sometimes result in major upheavals, or to use the phrase from physics, "phase transitions"? The sort of system described in this book is not in equilibrium in the standard sense, it is constantly changing and moving from state to state and its very structure is always being modified. The economy is not a ship sailing on a well-defined trajectory which occasionally gets knocked off course. It is more like the slime described in the book "emergence", constantly reorganising itself so as to slide collectively in directions which are neither understood nor necessarily desired by its components.
Author: Jeffrey S. Banks Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521478106 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Political economy has been an essential realm of inquiry and has attracted myriad intellectual adherents for much of the period of modern scholarship. The discipline's formal split into the distinct studies of political science and economics in the nineteenth-century, while advantageous for certain scientific developments, has biased the way economists and political scientists think about many issues, and has placed artificial constraints on the study of many important social issues. This volume calls for a reaffirmation of the importance of the unified study of political economy, and explores the frontiers of the interaction between politics and markets. This volume brings together intellectual leaders of various areas, drawing upon state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical analysis from each of the underlying disciplines. Each chapter, while beginning with a survey of existing work, focuses on profitable lines of inquiry for future developments. Particular attention is devoted to fields of active current development.
Author: Barbara Townley Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191559423 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Reason, and the need to Be Rational, are essential dimensions of society and the organizations we live and work in. Yet the 'rationalization' of working and administrative processes, or the 'rationality' studied in social sciences, is all too often, used, understood, and interpreted in an extremely narrow sense. Reason's Neglect does three things. Firstly, it argues that rationality is a leitmotif of organization studies, but one that has often been neglected. Secondly, it deploys Foucault's work to recover the neglected dimensions of rationality. In doing this, it allows for a revisionary exploration of key subjects in organization studies: organization theory, bureaucracy, technology, culture, practice, etc. Finally, the book presents the case of new rational management techniques being introduced in an organization, allowing individuals to 'speak for themselves', and examining how they respond to these innovations, and how they make sense of them. Arguing that rationality should be seen as disembedded, embedded, or embodied, each chapter goes on to explore a different aspect of reason, such as economic, bureaucratic, technocratic, institutional, or contextual. Clearly written and structured, yet an engaged and challenging approach to the study of organizations in society, Reason's Neglect is an iconoclastic book.
Author: Ronald De Sousa Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262540575 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
In this urbane and witty book, Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists. He argues that emotions are a kind of perception, that their roots in the paradigm scenarios in which they are learned give them an essentially dramatic structure, and that they have a crucial role to-play in rational beliefs, desires, and decisions by breaking the deadlocks of pure reason.The book's twelve chapters take up the following topics: alternative models of mind and emotion; the relation between evolutionary, physiological, and social factors in emotions; a taxonomy of objects of emotions; assessments of emotions for correctness and rationality; the regulation by emotions of logical and practical reasoning; emotion and time; the mechanism of emotional self-deception; the ethics of laughter; and the roles of emotions in the conduct of life. There is also an illustrative interlude, in the form of a lively dialogue about the ideology of love, jealousy, and sexual exclusiveness. A Bradford Book.
Author: Kurt Weyland Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400828066 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
Why do very different countries often emulate the same policy model? Two years after Ronald Reagan's income-tax simplification of 1986, Brazil adopted a similar reform even though it threatened to exacerbate income disparity and jeopardize state revenues. And Chile's pension privatization of the early 1980s has spread throughout Latin America and beyond even though many poor countries that have privatized their social security systems, including Bolivia and El Salvador, lack some of the preconditions necessary to do so successfully. In a major step beyond conventional rational-choice accounts of policy decision-making, this book demonstrates that bounded--not full--rationality drives the spread of innovations across countries. When seeking solutions to domestic problems, decision-makers often consider foreign models, sometimes promoted by development institutions like the World Bank. But, as Kurt Weyland argues, policymakers apply inferential shortcuts at the risk of distortions and biases. Through an in-depth analysis of pension and health reform in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru, Weyland demonstrates that decision-makers are captivated by neat, bold, cognitively available models. And rather than thoroughly assessing the costs and benefits of external models, they draw excessively firm conclusions from limited data and overextrapolate from spurts of success or failure. Indications of initial success can thus trigger an upsurge of policy diffusion.
Author: Alfred R. Mele Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780198033240 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 498
Book Description
Rationality has long been a central topic in philosophy, crossing standard divisions and categories. It continues to attract much attention in published research and teaching by philosophers as well as scholars in other disciplines, including economics, psychology, and law. The Oxford Handbook of Rationality is an indispensable reference to the current state of play in this vital and interdisciplinary area of study. Twenty-two newly commissioned chapters by a roster of distinguished philosophers provide an overview of the prominent views on rationality, with each author also developing a unique and distinctive argument.
Author: Cristina Bicchieri
Author: Michael Suk-Young Chwe
Author: Christopher McMahon
Author: Alan Kirman
Author: Jeffrey S. Banks
Author: Barbara Townley
Author: Christophe Chamley
Author: Ronald De Sousa
Author: Kurt Weyland
Author: Alfred R. Mele