A synthesis of behavioural and mainstream economics

Robert Aumann

Nature Human Behaviour, 2019, vol. 3, issue 7, 666-670

Abstract: Abstract Mainstream economic theory is based on the rationality assumption: that people act as best they can to promote their interests. In contrast, behavioural economics holds that people act by behavioural rules of thumb, often with poor results. We propose a synthesis according to which people indeed act by rules, which usually work well, but may work poorly in exceptional or contrived scenarios. The reason is that like physical features, behavioural rules are the product of evolutionary processes; and evolution works on the usual, the common—not the exception, not the contrived scenario.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0617-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:nathum:v:3:y:2019:i:7:d:10.1038_s41562-019-0617-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0617-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().