L'AGENT ÉCONOMIQUE : RATIONALITÉ MAXIMALE OU MINIMALE

It is usually admitted that an ideally rational economic agent must be endowed with perfect deductive abilities applied to correct and consistent beliefs and preferences. Since such requirements must exclude change in taste as well as learning, omniscience and even science of the future would be logically implied. These requirements would transform the ideal rational agent into a timeless agent unable to act. Once this self-contradictory notion is rejected, the difference between models of economic agent becomes a matter of degree of rationality in a scale going from the alleged maximisation of neoclassical models to bounded or even minimal rationality