Rationality and what I’ve been up to
December 8th, 2009
I’m doing alot of research into rationality lately. Specificaly into looking at how people percieve reciprocity, altruism and punishment. I personally am not convinced of a human tendency to become altruistic, as is Herbert Gintis and some other folks involved with behavioral econ. I have recently dl’d a whole lot of the journal articles having to do with Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory. I am not convinced, in the least, by their theory but I am very interested in understanding it. Thus far I am thinking of writing a research paper arguing that prospect theory can align with the rational choice model but I am a bit away from this paper, still have much literature to review.
Just wanted to drop this post to let readers know what I am up to:
- Game Theory
- Altruism/Reciprocity/Punishment
- Rational Choice Theory
- Decision Theory
These are my major areas of interest at the moment. I am hoping to get funding to do research in one or several of these areas but we will see. I am hoping to get into to the Temple Diamond Research Scholars Program, but if that doesn’t work out I will be just as happy to get into the Mises Institute Summer Fellowship program. I plan on applying to several of these type of programs, and we’ll see how it turns out. I am working on a theory that reconciles rational choice with some of the ‘irrational choices’ made in the Kahneman and Tversky, and other Behavioral econ studies, including Dan Ariely. So we will see how it goes. I need a little more free time than the regular school semester offers in order to write a paper about this topic because of the massive scope and all the literature review which it entails.
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