Rationality in Economics Constructivist and Ecological Forms [Paperback]

This book explores constructivist and ecological approaches to rationality in economics.This book constitutes an empirical behavioral challenge to traditional economic and game theory. Using constructivist and ecological approaches, Vernon L. Smith, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science, provides a new perspective based on experimental science that considers the work of F. A. Hayek and the classical liberal tradition. In so doing, the author opens positive new directions for scholarly research and applications in experimental economics methodology.This book constitutes an empirical behavioral challenge to traditional economic and game theory. Using constructivist and ecological approaches, Vernon L. Smith, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science, provides a new perspective based on experimental science that considers the work of F. A. Hayek and the classical liberal tradition. In so doing, the author opens positive new directions for scholarly research and applications in experimental economics methodology.The principal findings of experimental economics are that impersonal exchange in markets converges in repeated interaction to the equilibrium states implied by economic theory, under information conditions far weaker than specified in the theory. In personal, social, and economic exchange, as studied in two-person games, cooperation exceeds the prediction of traditional game theory. This book relates these two findings to field studies and applications and integrates them with the main themes of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the thoughts of F. A. Hayek.Part I. Rationality, Markets, and Institutions: 1. Rediscovering the Scottish philosophers; 2. On two forms of rationality; Part II. Impersonal Exchange: The Extended Order of the Market: 3. Relating the two concepts of a rational order; 4. Market institutions and performance; 5. Asymmetric information and equilibrium without process; 6. Spectrum auctions and combinatorial designs: theory and experlc$