This paper begins with a general discussion of the epistemology of rational choice, and argues that there are important questions in political science for which rational choice theory is not a particularly useful epistemic tool. It is further argued that part of the problem lies with the particular vision of methodological individualism that is inherent in the use of classical rational choice a...

Is it rational to be mindful? Can one be more or less rationally mindful? Can one be more or less mindfully rational? In this short article I explore the contribution that mindfulness can make to modeling and theorizing about rationality—including rational choice and rational belief, or ‘epistemic rationality’. The two streams of literature have in fact never met—a sign of the self-defeating is...

For the last twenty-five years I have worked on understanding the behavioral underpinnings of environmental policy. My work has explored how institutions, incentives, and nature interact, with the goal of finding tools to help provide environmental protection at lower cost. The research revolves around a Rule of One: one rational person can move society toward predicted market equilibria; one i...

The mere act of choosing implies giving up possible alternatives and is therefore likely to generate a feeling of regret, which agents anticipate at the decision stage. In line with regret theory, I study the impact of anticipated regret on the decisionmaking process. The key feature of the model consists in considering biased regret anticipations. I thus describe the combined effect of cogniti...

Findings from behavioral organization theory, behavioral decision theory, survey research, and experimental economics leave no doubt about the failure of rational choice as a descriptive model of human behavior. But this does not mean that people and their politics are irrational. Bounded rationality asserts that decision makers are intendedly rational; that is, they are goaloriented and adapti...

Beginning with Abhijit V. Banerjee (1992) and Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch (1992), a theoretical literature has explored rational inference in social-learning settings. In the simplest model, a sequence of people each in turn choose one of two options, A or B, with each person observing all of her predecessors’ choices. They have common preferences over the two choices,...

The work cited by the Nobel committee was done jointly with Amos Tversky (1937-1996) during a long and unusually close collaboration. Together, we explored the psychology of intuitive beliefs and choices and examined their bounded rationality. Herbert A. Simon (1955, 1979) had proposed much earlier that decision makers should be viewed as boundedly rational, and had offered a model in which uti...

Mate choice models derive from traditional microeconomic decision theory and assume that individuals maximize their Darwinian fitness by making economically rational decisions. Rational choices exhibit regularity, whereby the relative strength of preferences between options remains stable when additional options are presented. We tested female frogs with three simulated males who differed in re...

When modelling human discrete choice the standard approach is to adopt the rational model. This has been shown, however, to fail systematically under some conditions, which makes evident the need for a better approach. The choice model is however only part of the problem because it does not say how to deal with uncertainty, where learning is necessary. In this regard, some evidences support the...

renal vein thrombosis (rvt) is the most frequent vascular abnormality in newborns, but rarely seen in adults. rvt is an acute problem, and diagnostic and therapeutic approaches should be done immediately. surgical thrombectomy is not a rational approach and the treatment of choice is conservative management and thrombolytic therapy. we present a 45 years old male patient with chronic renal vein...