The paper provides an brief overview of the “state of the art” in the theory of rational decision making since the 1950’s, and focuses specially on the evolutionary justification of rationality. It is claimed that this justification, and more generally the economic methodology inherited...

We analyze the BBC TV game show "The Weakest Link", using data from 77 episodes, covering 13,380 questions. We focus on the banking decision, where a contestant chooses to secure an amount of money for the eventual winner, or to risk it on a general knowledge question. In the latter case, should...

Agent heterogeneity has been used in recent economic literature to justify nonlinear dynamics for the time paths of aggregate economic variables. In this paper, the mechanism through which heterogeneous agents leads to chaotic motion is explained. Adding to a system with initial behavior...

Research activities have uncertain outcomes. The question asked in this paper is whether or not this uncertainty can be a central piece on the explanation of long run consumption growth paths. More specifically, we inquire how the existence of different research projects, with different degrees...

Monetary policy has an important role in the determination of the inflation rate and the output gap time trajectories. Monetary authorities should choose the nominal interest rate time path that best serves the goals of price stability (primarily) and output growth (as a consequence of the...

This paper introduces a psychological notion of categorization into economics and derives its implications for economic decision making. We show, using a tractable model of social cognition, that a decision maker in (efficiently) assigning past experiences to categories, will sort experiences of...

We analyze different ways of pairing agents in a bipartite matching problem, with regard to its scaling properties and to the distribution of individual ``satisfactions''. Then we explore the role of partial information and bounded rationality in a generalized {\it Marriage Problem}, comparing...

Asset prices are forward looking. This evidence implies that prices of financial assets are essentially determined by the traders expectations about future prices. Another evidence about asset prices is that these do not seem to follow a predictable pattern over time; we observe periods of high...

This paper evaluates performance of human subjects and instances of a bidding model that interact in continuous ­time double auction experiments. Asks submitted by instances of the seller model (``automated sellers'') maximize the seller's expected surplus relative to a heuristic belief...

In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real- world complex biological, technological and informal social phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the analysis of...