Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Psychology and Economics

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer
• Co-Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Ortmann
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2004 to 2007
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5430490

The summer school on bounded rationality in psychology and economics brings together the knowledge of both fields concerning the nature of judgment and decision making, individual and social, as well as descriptive and prescriptive. This could have an important impact on institutional or constitutional design. What is recommendable when people react opportunistically an optimally may be questionable when taking into account the actual routines, heuristics and cognitive ideas that people really apply when generating their choices. The aim ist to counter the academic separation of both fields, to bridge the opposition between the psychological and the rational, and to encourage a more interdisciplinary point of view in the next generation of scholars. Specifically, our aim is to promote bounded rationality as the study of how actual people (rather than Homo oeconomicus) make decisions - by paying attention to cognitive, social, and motivational principles rather than the maximization of expected utility (Gigerenzer % Selten, 2001). Our goal is to provide young scientists with an excellent starting point for making progress toward a more realistic concept of judgment and decision making, by teaching them to transcend the border of their own disciplines. Students from psychology will have the opportunity to learn the advantages of precise mathematical models of human behavior with and without strategic interaction and of paying attention to institutional and economic contexts of decision making. Students from economics will lern about the heuristic processes of judgment and decision making, its emotional and motivational anchoring, and how to combine this perspective with results of experimental economics, game theory, and related fields.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Czech Republic
• Participating Persons: Anja Dieckmann; Professor Dr. Werner Güth; Dr. Peter M. Todd