Economist Writing Every Day

Like last week, this post is adjacent to the internet chattering over whether behavioral economics is “dead”.

Vernon Smith wrote a book Rationality in Economics that came out in 2008. I’m going to pull some quotes from that book that I think are relevant. This is not an attempt to summarize the main point of the book.

I began developing and applying experimental economics methods to the study of behavior and market performance in the 1950s and 1960s…

Preface, pg xiii

Repetitive or real-time action in incomplete information environments is an operating skill different from modeling based on the “given” information postulated to drive the economic environment that one seeks to understand in the sense of equilibrium, optimality, and welfare. This decision skill is based on a deep human capacity to acquire tacit knowledge that defies all but fragmentary articulation in natural or written language.

Preface, pg xv

I think that improved understanding of various forms of ecological rationality will be born of a far better appreciation that most of human knowledge of “how,” as opposed to knowledge of “that,” depends heavily on autonomic functions of the brain. Human sociality leads to much unconscious learning in which the rules and norms of our socioeconomic skills are learned with little specific instructions… Humans are not “thinking machines” in the sense that we always rely on self-aware cognitive processes…

Introduction, pg 5, emphasis his

Research in economic psychology[footnote 6] has prominently reported examples where “fairness” and other considerations are said to contradict the rationality assumptions… Footnote 6: I will use the term “economic psychology” generally to refer to cognitive psychology as it has been applied to economics questions, and to a third subfield of experimental methods in economics and recently product-differentiated as “behavioral economics”… Behavioral economists have made a cottage industry of showing that SSSM assumptions seem to apply almost nowhere… their research program has been a candidly deliberate search “Identifying the ways in which behavior differs from the standard model…”

Introduction, pg 22, italics mine

Vernon Smith doesn’t always like the direction of the behavioral economics literature as a whole, however he agrees in the book that humans don’t always behave rationally. Chapter 6 has the very un-fuzzy title FCC Spectrum Auctions and Combinatorial Designs. Here’s an example of the way Vernon uses the word behavioral, which I offer like I did last week as an example of how “behavioral” is never going away.

I will provide a brief review of the theoretical issues and some… experimental findings that bear most directly on the conceptual and behavioral foundation of the FCC design problem.

Chapter 6, pg 116

Unfortunately, the popular press… has often interpreted the contributions of Kahneman as proving that people are “irrational,” in the popular sense of stupid… In the Nobel interview, Kahneman seems clearly to be uncomfortable with this popular interpretation and is trying to correct it.

Chapter 7, pg 150

Chapter 7 is about loss aversion and fairness and any other “behavioral” phenomenon of interest. I recommend anyone who is following the current conversation to read all of Chapter 7 for yourself. Vernon sees the best in all whenever possible, despite being annoyed that certain academics have used a tool he developed to make points that he believes are wrong. He forges a way forward for everyone in this book.

Experiments help us understand how human beings who are prone to error can arrive at good outcomes when they are working within good/effective institutions.