Paradoxes versus formalism in economics. Evidence from the early years of game theory and experimental economics

Alessandro Innocenti ()

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: This paper argues that the acceptance of two recent methodological advances in economics, namely game theory and laboratory experimentation, was affected by the history dependence constraining the formalization of economics. After an early period in which the two methods were coolly received by economists because their applications challenged some basic hypotheses of mainstream economics, their subsequent acceptance was the result of the corroboration of those same hypotheses. However, the recent emergence of some paradoxes has finally revealed that the effectiveness of game theory and experimental techniques in economics is improved when descriptively implausible and normatively unsatisfactory assumptions such as the centrality of individual maximization in decision theory and the definition of rationality as consistency in preferences are revised.

Keywords: paradoxes; game theory; experiments; individual maximization; economic rationality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B21 B40 C90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-his and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.deps.unisi.it/quaderni/433.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usi:wpaper:433

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fabrizio Becatti ().