A review essay on Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, xx+503.

This chapter is a very compressed review of the neoclassical orthodoxy on the nature of rationality on economic theory. It defends the orthodoxy both against the behavioral criticism that it assumes too much and the revisionist view that it assumes too little. In places, especially on the...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

From its inception in the marginal revolution of the 1880s, neoclassical economics has depended on the notion of a rational economic agent, a Homo economicus. Equally, the notion of rationality has been the focus of criticism from those wishing to dispute one or another aspect of mainstream...

We define generalized extensive-form games which allow for mutual unawareness of actions. We extend Pearce's (1984) notion of extensive-form (correlated) rationalizability to this setting, explore its properties and prove existence. We define also a new variant of this solution concept, prudent...

Games in which players aim to guess a fraction or multiple p of the average guess are known as guessing games or (p-)beauty contests. In this note, we derive a full characterization of the set of rationalizable strategies and the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria for such games as a function...

The ultimatum game is a sequential-move bargaining game in which a “giver” offers a “taker” a share of a monetary pie. The predicted subgame perfect equilibrium is for rational givers to offer the smallest possible share, and for rational takers to accept. Experimental trials conducted...

We define generalized extensive-form games which allow for mutual unawareness of actions. We extend Pearce's (1984) notion of extensive-form (correlated) rationalizability to this setting, explore its properties and prove existence. -- Unawareness ; extensive-form games ; extensive-form...

We define an extensive-form analogue of iterated admissibility, called Prudent Rationalizability (PR). In each round of the procedure, for each information set of a player a surviving strategy of hers is required to be rational vis-a-vis a belief system with a full-support belief on the...