On Jun 2, 2005, at 3:10 AM, John Collier wrote:
> At 05:57 PM 2005/06/01, you wrote:
>
>> I may have missed it, but I have been surprised that the recently
>> emerged discipline of econophysics has not yet received much
>> attention during this FIS session. This discipline is being
>> forged by the work of physicists like Eugene Stanley and
>> economists like Brian Arthur, and it is founded on the notion that
>> economies can be better understood as self-organizing complex
>> dynamical systems governed by the rules of physics. I am
>> personally optimistic about the value of this approach to
>> understanding economics, but I don't know enough about it to make
>> a good argument for it here. I hope that this post will help to
>> stimulate some discussion about econophysics in this forum.
>>
>
> Another fairly recent approach to economics is so-called
> neuroeconomics. The idea is to see what is going on inside the head
> during problems like gambling decisions, and in general to
> understand the neural basis of decision making. Three of my
> colleagues of a grant to do fMRI studies on gambling cases. So far
> the field is just getting off the ground, but my feeling is that so
> far it is quite reductionist, and it pays little attention to
> information flow or processing (I hope to correct that). Secondly,
> the current assumptions tend to lead to looking for reward
> increases and decreases rather than reorganization and emergence of
> new patterns. I suppose that is OK for a new field. In any case,
> the neuroeconomists think they might eventually have something to
> say to economists about the nature of economic decision making.
John,
Thanks for bringing this into the conversation. There is another
relevant body of literature written largely by behavioral scientists
based on individual performances in experimental economic games. For
example, one well-studied game (I forget the name of the game)
establishes two classes of subjects: givers and receivers. Each
giver starts with a meaningful sum of money on paper and is paired
with a receiver, and each is anonymous to the other. The giver must
decide how much of the sum to offer to the receiver, and the receiver
either accepts or rejects the offer. If the offer is rejected,
neither individual gets any money. If it is accepted, then each
receives the agreed upon amounts. When this game was played with
individuals from primitive cultures the total amount at stake was
equivalent to something like 1/3 of an annual income. This
experiment has been repeated many times and in a variety of social
contexts. The results have always been largely inconsistent with the
basic assumption of standard Keynesian economics, which states that
individuals act so as to maximize their profits. It seems that
cultural norms are much more important drivers of individual economic
behavior, and that these norms are free to evolve far from the
Keynesian criterion. I see these results as providing strong support
for the notion that economic behavior evolves as an aspect of
cultural self-organization. For those who are not familiar with this
literature I can suggest a couple of references.
Robert Boyd, Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, and Peter J. Richerson
The evolution of altruistic punishment
PNAS 2003 100: 3531-3535
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests
The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life
Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert T. Boyd and Ernst Fehr (Eds.)
January 2005
Cheers,
Guy Hoelzer
Department of Biology
University of Nevada Reno
Reno, NV 89557
Phone: 775-784-4860
Fax: 775-784-1302
Received on Thu Jun 2 18:24:53 2005
