Rationales for rationality

Paul Krugman

pp. 111-122

in: Ken Dennis (ed), Rationality in economics, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

Even economists find Economic Man—the perfectly rational decision maker of our theories—a humorous character. We all know that in real life people make irrational decisions for all sorts of reasons—because they cannot figure out what they want, because they cannot be bothered to look for the right answer, or because they want to be the same as (or different from) other people. The economist who truly believes in individual rationality is as much a fiction as homo economicus himself.