The consistency and ecological rationality approaches to normative bounded rationality

Nathan Berg

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2014, vol. 21, issue 4, 375-395

Abstract: This paper focuses on tacit versus explicit uses of plural performance metrics as a primary methodological characteristic. This characteristic usefully distinguishes two schools of normative analysis and their approaches to normative interpretations of bounded rationality. Both schools of thought make normative claims about bounded rationality by comparing the performance of decision procedures using more than one performance metric. The consistency school makes tacit reference to performance metrics outside its primary axiomatic framework, but lexicographically promotes internal axiomatic consistency as the primary, and in most cases sufficient, normative outcome with which to undertake welfare comparisons. The consistency school's axiomatization program, in both neoclassical and behavioral forms, pre-commits to welfare interpretations that follow a hierarchy of rationalities based on the stringency of restrictions that different axiomatizations impose on choice data. In contrast, the ecological rationality school explicitly adopts multiple, domain-specific performance metrics, reflecting the view that adequate descriptions of well-being are irreducibly multivariate (i.e., non-scalar).

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1080/1350178X.2014.969910

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