Cognitio 2011

Abstract: Profound differences in the way the idea of choice is understood in psychology and economics are under-appreciated, mainly as a result of equivocations introduced through the bounded rationality movement. This matters in fairly predictable ways for cross-talk confusions in interdisciplinary work in cognitive science, and in policy recommendations. It emerges in a particularly interesting and revealing way in the new field that aims to fuse economics with neuroscience, neuroeconomics. This field is in fact the loose, and incipiently tension-ridden, association of two very distinct research programmes, one of which implicitly reduces the economic concept of choice to the psychological one, while the other brings real economic analysis to bear on problems in computational learning theory.