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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
INFORMATION IN ECONOMIC THEORY: A
DATABASE-LIKE CHARACTERIZATION
Fernando Tohmé
Department of Economics
Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, Argentina
April 19, 2005
Tuesday, 12:30pm-2:00pm
Sumwalt College, Room 102
We present a discussion of the concept of information in Economics. We
begin by presenting the prevalent model, closely associated with the
Maximization of Expected Utility hypothesis. While it has proved to be
useful in many ways, it also exhibits many shortcomings, which we
illustrate with some examples. On the other hand, the evidence accumulated
by Experimental Economics shows that the actual behavior of economic agents
does not necessarily respond to the traditional characterization that stems
from von Neumann and Morgenstern's (1943) work.
We present, instead, the idea of information as represented by a modular,
updatable and linguistic structure. We draw from Computer Science the
concept of "database" as an adequate structure with those features. Logics
provides a way of characterizing the selection of an appropriate database
up from real world data and underlying constraints. These constraints do
actually configure the information held by an agent.
Anomalies in rational behavior as well as non-Bayesian information updates
can be modeled by means of this approach, although its full development is
still ahead. (This paper is a joint work with M. Ficosecco.)
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