Comment on Andreas Ortmann and Gerd Gigerenzer

Abstract

In their contribution, Ortmann and Gigerenzer summarize shortly two main research paradigms on reasoning and decision making which seem to be the same in psychology and economics. Let us call them shortly the rational and the behavioral approach. The former focuses on the formal laws of reasoning, statistical inference, and rational decision making, the latter emphasizes observed systematic deviations from the rational approach and prefers descriptive models of routine or heuristic guided behavior. Such empirical violations of economic standard assumptions are well investigated by psychology and experimental economics (Davis and Holt 1993, Hogarth and Reeder 1987, Kagel and Roth 1995, Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky 1982). The interesting point is that Ortmann and Gigerenzer among others show, that (a) the presence of a social context, (b) the content of the situation, and (c) the perspective of the decision maker in this context significantly determines the reasoning and (therefore) decision behavior. These results could be interpreted as special cases of framing effects which are empirically well known (Conlisk 1996). But in contrast to the heuristics-and- biases research which overemphasizes the deviations from rational decisionmaking, Ortmann and Gigerenzer argue, that a clear experimental design could also reduce these biases. They criticize that experimental economics did not sufficiently take care about the impact of experimental design on the results, thus often producing artifacts.