The two projects of microeconomics

• Autores: James G. March
• Localización: Industrial and Corporate Change, ISSN-e 1464-3650, Vol. 23, Nº. 2, 2014, págs. 609-612
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The Mazzoleni and Nelson paper published in Industrial and Corporate Change 22:6 (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 2013) is a graceful and informative excursion into the ambiguities of intellectual history. As I can lay no claim to special knowledge about the intellectual history of economics, I can only be impressed. The paper is also an examination of the possible future of microeconomics. Mazzoleni and Nelson have prejudices, so do I. This recitation of my prejudices has been stimulated by reading theirs, but it can be interpreted as a comment on their paper only in the sense in which an after dinner speech is commentary on the food.

    Modern microeconomics can be seen as a conflation of two projects. The first project is a normative one: inducing humans and artificial actors to make choices that exhibit intelligence of a particular kind. Within the litany of contemporary thought, it draws its framework from theories of choice, particularly those associated with modern statistics. It leads an acolyte to the pleasures of gambling, decision trees, Bayesian estimates, discounting, risk preference, derivatives, game theory, and the other refinements of rational action. It is encapsulated not only in introductory economics but also in statistics, operations research, finance, and management science. Its holy grail is the maximization of expected value as determined by a personal, exogenous, stable, consistent utility function; its principal technologies are the technology of estimation and the technology of gambling. It purports to provide an unassailable template for intelligent action.

    The second project is a positive one: describing the actual choices of clusters of intelligent humans when they are organized into markets, organizations, or other forms of interaction. It seeks to describe how decisions happen in individuals, groups, organizations, or societies. It explores the consumption choices of �