Review Rationality and its Discontents审视理性及其不满.pdfVIP

F162 T H E E C O N O M I C J O U R N A L [ F E B R U A R Y Review 2. Rationality and its Discontents* Ken Binmore needs no introduction to readers of this Journal . In Rational Decisions, this mathematician turned economist turned philosopher combines brief introduc- tions to Bayesian decision theory and game theory with a far-reaching and synthetic assessment of the limits of Bayesian decision theory and offer new directions in extending decision theory to situations where the traditional approach does not apply. Binmore’s arguments are generally sketchy and impressionistic, seeking to convey ideas rather than rigorously justifying them. His references to the literature are broad and deep, hence likely to keep the interested reader busy for a good period of time. This book is thus not for the economist who is blissfully contented with the usual version of the theory learned in graduate school (Varian, 1992; Mas-Colell et al., 1995). Nor is this book for the beginner, who would do better reading Savage (1954) directly, or a more recent didactic exposition (Kreps, 1988; Gintis, 2009b). For instance, Binmore follows Anscombe and Aumann (1963) in deriving the expected utility theorem axiomatically, thus side-stepping the behaviourally important issue of how consistent preferences lead to probability distributions when the choices involved do not include lotteries with objective probabilities. More generally, Binmore passes seamlessly from elementary exposition to deep and complex issues that are bound to leave the novice in the dust. 1. Small Worlds, Large Worlds Binmore begins by defining the enemy as Bayesianism, which he describes as the doctrine that ‘Bayesian decision theory is always rational’. The doctrine entails, for example, that David Hume was wrong to argue that sc