HiPhiS seminar "Emerging phenomena in economics - the case of institutions".

Tuesday, June 20, 2017 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
IAE, Amphi Robert Reix, bât 29, campus Triolet.
Inter-university seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 cycle "Causes, foundations, origins".
Lecture presented by Bernard Walliser, economist, D.R. CNRS emeritus, Paris Sciences Économiques, ENS Paris.

Summary:

Emergence phenomena, in the physical or social sciences, refer to the difficulty of modeling macroscopic phenomena on the basis of the properties of underlying microscopic entities. This difficulty may be epistemic or, more profoundly, ontological in nature, at the level of both concepts and relations. An example of this is the spontaneous emergence of institutions in a society, such as the market or the currency. The role of an institution is to coordinate the actions of agents in the face of failures that can be analyzed within the framework of game theory. An institution thus appears as a behavioral norm that supports a particular equilibrium in a game. The genesis of this equilibrium may be educational (through the sophisticated reasoning of the agents alone) or evolutionary (through the learning processes of the agents).
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