Bargaining and Market Behavior

About this book

Economic theorists and cognitive (decision behavior) psychologists agree on several core (maintained) hypotheses about human decision making: (1) rationality in social and economic contexts derives directly from the rationality of individual decision makers - if surveys of isolated individuals indicate irrational responses, ipso facto, markets and other group interaction decision systems will be irrational; (2) individual rationality is a self-aware cognitive process - if people get things right, it is through thinking about and understanding the processes in which they partake; and (3) the human mind is modeled as a general purpose problem-solving machine that governs reasoning, learning, memory, and decision making with "no features specialized for processing particular kinds of content" (Gigerenzer, 1996, p. 329).