Overview

Cognitive economics is concerned with the beliefs and mental operations held by actors placed within a dynamical and strategic environment. It appears as a synthesis of an eductive research program dealing with crossed expectations of actors and of an evolutionist research program dealing with collective learning processes. It first aims at extending the framework of game theory in order to better fit with the results of rapidly increasing laboratory experiments concerned with individual choices and collective interactions. Cognitive economics also aims at better explaining some original economic phenomena involving boundedly rational agents in an institutional setting such as financial bubbles, job search or technological innovation. Written in an informal way, this book is addressed to philosophers or cognitive scientists curious of how economics deals with cognition and to graduate students in economics eager to discover how economics evolves.