Review of Economic Philosophy

Tag: Beliefs

  • The logic of the detour

    Abstract

    The logic of the detour (“stepping back in order to better leap forward”) constitutes the heart of economic rationality. However, it is shown that: 1) the capacity to make detours, far from being an essential property of human beings, is either denied them, or very difficult to mobilize, in fundamental areas of their activity (ethics and epistemology); 2) this capacity, when it is actually present, far from constituting an “adaptive advantage”, can reveal itself to be the principal obstacle to the application of instrumental rationality, even though hasty analyses of the latter hold it to be closely tied to the former.

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  • Learning in the Trust Game

    Abstract

    We use experimental data from a repeated trust game to estimate structural learning models that let us differentiate between the learning processes of the two players. We find that the two players cannot be described by the same learning process. Long-run simulations then show that the interaction of the two estimated types of players can lead to distinct outcomes.

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