Economics and Language
Five Essays

Economics and Language
Five Essays

Economics and Language
Five Essays

The psychologist Joel Davitz once wrote: ªI suspect that
most research in the social sciences has roots somewhere
in the personal life of the researcher, though these roots are
rarely reported in published papersº (Davitz, 1976). The
®rst part of this statement de®nitely applies to this book.
Though I am involved in several ®elds of economics and
game theory, all my academic research has been motivated
by my childhood desire to understand the way that people
argue. In high school, I wanted to study logic, which I
thought would be useful in political debates or in legal
battles against evil once I ful®lled my dream of becoming a
solicitor. Unfortunately, I became neither a lawyer nor a
politician, and I have since come to understand that logic
is not a very useful tool in these areas in any case.
Nonetheless, I continued to explore formal models of game
theory and economic theory, though not in the hope of predicting
human behavior,
not in anticipation of predicting
the
stock market prices, and without any illusion about
the
ability of capturing all of reality
in one simple model. I
am
simply interested
in the reasoning
behind decision
making
and in the arguments
people bring in debates. I am
still
puzzled, and even fascinated, by the magic of the links
between
the formal
language of mathematical models and
natural
language. This brings me to the subject of this
lecture
± ªEconomics and Language.º

ARIEL RUBINSTEIN