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Lessard, Paul R.

Mathematics

2013

MS

An overwhelming number of studies in recent decades have demonstrated irrefutably that human decision-making is not rational in the neoclassical sense. Alongside, Schelling's model of racial segregation makes clear that even simple agencies can, and regularly do, manifest system level behavior seemingly anathematic to those agencies. We adumbrate an approach to economic study straddling the gap between micro and macro, built specifically around these two pillars; (1) cognitive as opposed to rational models of agent behavior, and (2) countervalent emergence. We develop a simple agent based model as part of an imagined human cognitive-ethology, thus providtnga prototype for a subtly different approach to economics and a way out of a classic quagmire regarding human nature. Our model exhibits a countervalent emergence that could explain the stability of hight Gini coefficient resource distributions independent of a selfishness axiom.