000 02067cam a2200253 4500500
005 20250121113830.0
041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aKirman, Alan
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aRational expectations in a changing world
260 _c2021.
500 _a90
520 _aExpectations can either involve a consideration of what will happen in the future or be unrelated to time. Both play an important role in economics, but the temporal aspect will be the focus here. When we are concerned about how an economy will evolve over time, we have to make assumptions about how the individuals that make up the economy anticipate the future. In a world with uncertainty, it is not possible to model the evolution of the economy without making assumptions about the expectations that individuals hold. Economists assume that, based on their expectations, people make the “best” choice available to them. The “rational expectations” hypothesis assumes that people somehow all know correctly the process that governs the evolution of the economy. This paper argues that such an approach is not only unrealistic and inconsistent with the empirical evidence but incompatible with the non-ergodic evolution of our complex socioeconomic system. Given the impossibility of constructing a full-blown theory with “rational” or optimal behavior, we may need to base our analysis on the sort of heuristics that people and even animals use to plan their future actions. It is the interaction between agents using these heuristics that generates aggregate behavior, not the sophisticated calculations of those agents.
690 _auncertainty
690 _aheuristics
690 _acomplex systems
690 _aexpectations
690 _auncertainty
690 _aheuristics
690 _acomplex systems
690 _aexpectations
786 0 _nRevue d'économie politique | 131 | 3 | 2021-07-06 | p. 485-509 | 0373-2630
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-revue-d-economie-politique-2021-3-page-485?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c545836
_d545836