Evolution and Learning in Games and Economics

General Director:
Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University

Co-director:
Shmuel Zamir, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

The assumption of rationality of behaviour in the economy or indeed in any other complex context has been repeatedly challenged as unrealistic. As Herbert Simon put in, human beings and animals have "bounded rationality". But even if rationality is bounded, individuals can learn from experience; further, it is frequently argued, those individuals who learn best will grow in importance and possibly in number relative to the rest of the population, so that convergence to an equilibrium of rational behaviour is possible. Different aspects of this argument have been developed by cognitive psychologists, in the study of human and animal learning, and by evolutionary biologists. In recent years, there has been a growing literature using these concepts for the study of the evolution of economic systems. The equilibria of these dynamic systems may or may not be the rationally-based equilibria usually studied in game theory and economics. The 1995 Summer School is devoted to the study of these arguments, both by economists and by those studying the corresponding areas of psychology and biology.

 

Speakers:

Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University
Dan Cohen, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
VIncent Crawford, University of California, San Diego
Giovanni Dosi, University of Rome 
Patrick Suppes, Stanford University
H. Peyton Young, John Hopkins University