Rational Behaviour

Abstract

The concept of rational behaviour is frequently used in economic theory. The interest in this concept springs from two quite distinct motivations. First, insofar as economic exercises often take a prescriptive form, it is interesting to know how one could behave rationally in a given situation. This may be called the ‘prescriptive motivation’. It should be warned that the prescription need not be necessarily of an ethical kind. Indeed, the prescriptive motivation is sometimes described in clearly non-ethical terms, involving the pursuit of self-interest only. In a classic presentation of this position, Harsanyi (1977) describes ‘perfectly rational behaviour’ in the context of game theory in the following terms: These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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