Not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Universe seems to follow relatively simple deterministic laws. That doesn’t mean you can use quantum field theory to predict the weather. But chaotic systems can be modeled as statistical ensembles. Temperature is a meaningful measurement even if we can’t calculate the motion of all the individual gas molecules.
If you’re referring to human irrationality in particular, we can study cognitive bias, which is how human reasoning diverges from that of idealized agents in certain systematic ways. This is a topic of interest at both the individual level of psychology, and at the level of statistical ensembles in economics.
Thanks, I was thinking of the latter more (human irrationality), but found your first part still interesting. I understand irrationality was studied in psychology and economics, and I was wondering on the modeling of irrationality particularly, for 1-2 players, but also for a group of agents. For example, there are arguments saying for a group of irrational agents, the group choice could be rational depending on group structure etc. On individual irrationality and continued group irrationality, I think we would need to estimate the level of (and prevalence of ) irrationality in some way that captures unconscious preferences, or incomplete information. How to best combine these? Maybe it would just be just more data driven.
That seems to be getting into Game Theory territory. One can model agents (players) with different strategies, even suboptimal ones. A lot of the insight from Game Theory isn’t just about how to play a better strategy, but how changing the rules affects the game.
Not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Universe seems to follow relatively simple deterministic laws. That doesn’t mean you can use quantum field theory to predict the weather. But chaotic systems can be modeled as statistical ensembles. Temperature is a meaningful measurement even if we can’t calculate the motion of all the individual gas molecules.
If you’re referring to human irrationality in particular, we can study cognitive bias, which is how human reasoning diverges from that of idealized agents in certain systematic ways. This is a topic of interest at both the individual level of psychology, and at the level of statistical ensembles in economics.
Thanks, I was thinking of the latter more (human irrationality), but found your first part still interesting. I understand irrationality was studied in psychology and economics, and I was wondering on the modeling of irrationality particularly, for 1-2 players, but also for a group of agents. For example, there are arguments saying for a group of irrational agents, the group choice could be rational depending on group structure etc. On individual irrationality and continued group irrationality, I think we would need to estimate the level of (and prevalence of ) irrationality in some way that captures unconscious preferences, or incomplete information. How to best combine these? Maybe it would just be just more data driven.
That seems to be getting into Game Theory territory. One can model agents (players) with different strategies, even suboptimal ones. A lot of the insight from Game Theory isn’t just about how to play a better strategy, but how changing the rules affects the game.