Bernard Walliser – författare

Classical microeconomics is intended to explain how a price system is able to coordinate the economic agents. But even if it can be extended to incomplete information and externalities, it remains grounded on very heroic assumptions. Agents are endowed with a very strong rationality, equilibrium is stated without a concrete process to achieve it, market is the unique institution considered. Evolutionary microeconomics is aimed at bypassing these limitations by considering a dynamic approach, however not biologically oriented. Agents have local information and bounded rationality, they are involved in explicit processes of interactions through time, various institutions sustain the market or substitute to it. It explains then some phenomena hardly explained by classical microeconomics: dispersion of prices, variety of industrial structures, financial bubbles.

As a manifestation of a ''cognitive turn'' observable in all social sciences, Cognitive Economics is concerned with the beliefs and mental operations held by actors placed within a dynamical and strategic environment. It appears as a synthesis of an educative research program, dealing with crossed expectations of actors, and an evolutionist research program on collective learning processes.

The book mainly aims at extending the framework of game theory in order to better fit the results of rapidly increasing laboratory experiments concerned with individual choices and collective interactions. It also seeks to better explain some original economic phenomena involving boundedly rational agents in an institutional setting such as financial bubbles, job search or technological innovation.

Written in an informal way, the book is addressed to philosophers or cognitive scientists curious of how economics deal with cognition, as well as graduate students in economics eager to discover how economic science evolves.