Abstract
Social norm, an important and coordinating part in economic activities, can greatly reduce the information demand that economic decisions require. The assumption of “Rational Man”, which exists in the western mainstream economics, is based on the simplified model of the instinct of human beings. And this thoroughly ignores the social attribute of human beings. In the literature review, the assumption of “Rational Man” is analyzed as an abstract and deductive way based on the western culture of Christianity. This theory can better explain the economic behaviors of human beings under the specific social circumstance of the protestant ethic. However, its rationality cannot be guaranteed without such cultural background. Besides, under the eastern social circumstance dominated by Confucianism, the assumption of “Rational Man” can also bring prominent ethical conflicts. The assumption of “Information Economic Man” put forward by this thesis gives consideration both to the individual rationality and social features an economic man possesses, and better explains the impact of social norm on economic decisions. By bringing into the capital vector, and drawing on field theory, the model of “information field” is generated. It can provide economic man with a concise math model that affects the process of decision making. The size and direction of capital vector represent respectively the influence of economic factors and moral factors on economic decisions. And thus a wider range of economic behavior of human beings can be analyzed in a rational way.
Highlights
As the logical starting point of the basic behavioral hypothesis and theoretical system in modern western mainstream economic theory, the assumption of “Rational Man”, is on one hand deemed by some scholars as the most effective method
The dominant reason is that these rectification principles are still waiting for an abstract summarization using a concise mathematical model, which greatly limits their influence. To solve this mathematical modeling obstacle and as we can see that many defects will occur if we build a model of rational economic man assumption on the confrontation side of human behavior, it should be a reasonable attempt to build a new one on the cooperation side
Two extremities including unconditional cooperation and extreme conflict can even be achieved. Why is this “rational social man” called information economic man? There are two reasons: firstly, the terminology “rational social man” has been adopted by some scholars and the definition is fairly different from that of this thesis; secondly, the theory of economic man behavioral decisions proposed by this thesis uses information field as its major analytic method and the model mainly applies to the analysis of economic behaviors
Summary
As the logical starting point of the basic behavioral hypothesis and theoretical system in modern western mainstream economic theory, the assumption of “Rational Man”, is on one hand deemed by some scholars as the most effective method. Edgar Schein, a behavioral scientist from America, sorted out the matter of human nature and proposed the assumption of “Complex Man” in his book Organizational Psychology published in 1965. He argued that “human possesses complex motivations which should not be classified into one or two types . Jingtong He argued that behavioral man possesses dual motives of egoism as well as altruism that are two-dimensional orthogonal On this basis, he proposed the assumption of “Realistic Economic Man”. Thereupon a new behavioral model of economic man that combines individual rationality and his social attributes can be set up to explain the economic man behavior in realistic economic activities from a new perspective
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