Rationalism is ‘the stylistic criterion of all respectable politics'. So lamented political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in a series of essays published in the 1940s and 1950s. Rationalism, for Oakeshott, is shorthand for a propensity to prioritise the universal over the local, the uniform...

Alfred Schütz has paid considerable attention to the position of scientist in the world and particularly to that of social scientist. His analyses make extensive use of phenomenological concepts and contain detailed descriptions of scientific cognitive style in its relation to the everyday...

We call attention to the class of models that serve as the foundation for the rational expectations hypothesis (REH). Models in this class rule out completely any structural change that cannot be fully anticipated with a probabilistic or other quantitative rule. REH models are abstractions of...

We study the static assortment optimization problem under weakly rational choice models, i.e. models in which adding a product to an assortment does not increase the probability of purchasing a product already in that assortment. This setting applies to most choice models studied and used in...

This note explains the equivalence between approximate rationalizability and approximate cost-rationalizability within the context of consumer demand. In connection with these results, we interpret Afriat’s (1973) critical cost efficiency index (CCEI) as a measure of cost (in)efficiency, in...

New simple forms of deviation from rational expectation (RE) are suggested: strong near rational expectation (SNRE) and weak near rational expectation (WNRE). The medium-scale DSGE model is estimated with the RE, the SNRE and the WNRE. It is estimated with and without observed from the surveys...