ECONOMIC DECISION MAKING: A COGNITIVE CONTRIBUTION ON THE PATH OF SIMON, ALLAIS, TVERSKY AND KAHNEMAN
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22235/cp.v0i1.567Keywords:
cognitive psychology, economic theories, decision making processAbstract
Economics, in its origins as a science integrated psychology in the building process of its propositions. The field of decision making was very notorious in economic research. Later on, economics takes some distance from psychology, and develop in the center of their scientific constructions, the maximizer and omniscient homo economicus. Nevertheless the explanatory power of the neoclassical models began to be clearly imperfect showing numerous anomalies. Prominent scientists in the cognitive vein began, first explaining the pitfalls of the prevalent theories and later building cognitive psychology-rooted alternative models. The seminal cognitive contributions by Herbert Simon and Maurice Allais, trace the path for two pioneers scholars, the cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who developed a model which incorporates the advances in cognitive psychology in decision making scientific constructions. The paper reviews this paradigmatic example of scientific interdisciplinary nature between economics and cognitive psychology, in the search for better explanations to the decision making process.
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