Tractable Falsifiability

Ronen Gradwohl and Eran Shmaya

Discussion Papers from Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science

Abstract: We propose to strengthen Popper's notion of falsifiability by adding the requirement that when an observation is inconsistent with a theory, there must be a "short proof" of this inconsistency. We model the concept of a short proof using tools from computational complexity, and provide some examples of economic theories that are falsifiable in the usual sense but not with this additional requirement. We consider several variants of the de nition of "short proof" and several assumptions about the difficulty of computation, and study their different implications on the falsifiability of theories. JEL Classification: B400

Keywords: falsifiability; complexity; empirical content; rationalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
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