For a long time now, social sciences have developed their research program without taking carefully into account the cognitive processes of the agents. Conversely, cognitive sciences have looked almost exclusively at individual cognitive processes without any serious discussion of the social dimension of cognition which is crucial for human beings. One of the fundamental developments in cognitive and social sciences is a conceptual, theoretical and experimental cross fertilization between the two sets of fields. This development has led to the emergence of new cognitive social sciences such as cognitive anthropology, cognitive sociology and cognitive economy. A new research topic common to both social and cognitive science has appeared: social cognition, i.e distributed information processing between a large number of agents.
This book is devoted to cognitive economy as one of these new
domains. Standard economic theory, applied to a competitive exchange
market, is built on two main pillars:
- substantive individual rationality, illustrated by the so-called
'homo oeconomicus', who chooses the best buying or selling action
according to given beliefs and preferences;
- static collective equilibrium, symbolized by a fictitious 'Walrasian
auctioneer', who fixes the goods prices by equalizing producers
supplies and consumers demands.
These approaches have two correlated limitations: the first does not
consider the mental reasoning leading to the chosen action; the
second considers no concrete equilibration process leading to the
coordinated state. Two research programs, arising in the last twenty
years, have tried to look deeper into the problems raised by these
limitations:
- an epistemic program, grounded on individual beliefs and reasoning,
develops a procedural individual rationality, now symbolized by a
so-called 'homo cogitans /adaptans';
- an evolutionist program, based on interaction networks and
adaptation processes, which has developed the idea of
self-organization of a system and which studies emergent structures.
These two programs come together in 'cognitive economics', which can be defined as the study of information processing and adaptation processes implemented by bounded rational economic agents in their dynamic interactions. Such a research program presents important conceptual and theoretical difficulties which can be only overcome by a serious and lasting debate between economists, cognitive scientists, physicists and mathematicians some of whom have already made important contributions to the modelling of distributed information processing of neural networks in cognitive science. The main purpose of this book is to put together the basic material from these different fields and to show how this can be combined to generate the new field of cognitive economy.
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