In the first part of the paper (sec. 1-4), I argue that Elqayam and Evan's (2011) distinction between normative and instrumental conceptions of cognitive rationality corresponds to deontological vs. teleological accounts in meta-ethics. I suggest that Elqayam and Evans' distinction be replaced by the distinction between a-priori intuition-based vs. a-posteriori success-based accounts of cogniti...

Socio-ecological systems are increasingly modelled by games played on complex networks. While the concept of Nash equilibrium assumes perfect rationality, in reality players display heterogeneous bounded rationality. Here we present a topological model of bounded rationality in socio-ecological systems, using the rationality parameter of the Quantal Response Equilibrium. We argue that system ra...

the paper deals with kant's conception of moral judgment. i start by criticizing a dominant interpretation of kant's practical rationality in its assertion that choosing, i.e. exercising judgment consists in adopting a maxim; and adopting a maxim is equivalent to acting on a principle, giving oneself the moral law (korsgaard). according to this view, the logical inescapability of choo...

The introduction of a small amount of bounded rationality into a model sometimes has little effect, and sometimes has a dramatic impact on predicted behavior. We call a model robust to bounded rationality if small deviations from rationality result only in small changes in the equilibrium set. We also say that a model is structurally stable if the equilibrium set (given fully rational agents) v...

The concept of bounded rationality is not well-defined. Several aspects of bounded rationality are discussed. Two different kinds of bounded rationality are distinguished. First, rationality may be bounded in the sense that the player cannot perform all the necessary calculations within the time frame of the game. This applies not only to numerical calculations but also to any kind of informati...

Models in the classical theory of games and in neoclassical economics normally assume rationality in the sense that agents have compete and transitive preferences. The paper labels this fundamental rationality and distinguishs two other sorts of rationality pertinent to the study of strategic interaction: individual economic rationality (IER) and effective rationality. IER is, we observe, chara...

I took the title of this chapter from an email Herbert A. Simon sent me in May 1999. In this email, he wrote a statement for the back cover of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart in which he commented: “I think the book strikes a great blow for sanity in the approach to rationality [and shows] why more than minor tampering with existing optimization theory is called for.” But Herb wouldn’t be ...