Rational Hypothesis Research Articles

Rational Individual and Managerial Decision Model: A Critical Review of the Standard Rationality Hypothesis

Classical economic analysis is based on the hypothesis of perfect rationality attributed to economic agents. Their behavior is considered, according to this analysis, in a narrow sense represented by Homo-oeconomicus. The latter is a calculating agent in the true meaning of the term, who calculates to optimize his choice and maximize a utility function. However, in a decision-making process, the economic agent finds himself interacting with a complex and uncertain environment. To decide, he adapts his choice behavior to an end, considering the constraints of this environment. He does not always seek the optimal solution, but he can be satisfied with the solution that he considers satisfactory. This solution highlights the role of deliberation, which considers the norms and customs of society, as well as environmental constraints. This work revisits rationality by examining the assumptions underlying decision-making behaviors. This analysis considers the real motivations of the decision-maker and their implications in his decision-making process, both in the individual context and in that of the organization. It studies the sources of the limitation of rationality and seeks to know why the decision-maker abandons optimization and is interested in satisfactory solutions in his choice. The results of this analysis recommend that bounded rational behavior can still be considered when motivations are considered. They advocate that their understanding is fundamental to refound the economic behavior of choice on hypotheses, which correspond well to the social and economic context of the decision.

SLE: a cognitive step forward-a synthesis of rethinking theories, causality, and ignored DNA structures.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is classified by instinctual classification criteria. A valid proclamation is that these formally accepted SLE classification criteria legitimate the syndrome as being difficult to explain and therefore enigmatic. SLE involves scientific problems linked to etiological factors and criteria. Our insufficient understanding of the clinical condition uniformly denoted SLE depends on the still open question of whether SLE is, according to classification criteria, a well-defined one disease entity or represents a variety of overlapping indistinct syndromes. Without rational hypotheses, these problems harm clear definition(s) of the syndrome. Why SLE is not anchored in logic, consequent, downstream interdependent and interactive inflammatory networks may rely on ignored predictive causality principles. Authoritative classification criteria do not reflect consequent causality criteria and do not unify characterization principles such as diagnostic criteria. We need now to reconcile legendary scientific achievements to concretize the delimitation of what SLE really is. Not all classified SLE syndromes are "genuine SLE"; many are theoretically "SLE-like non-SLE" syndromes. In this study, progressive theories imply imperative challenges to reconsider the fundamental impact of "the causality principle". This may offer us logic classification and diagnostic criteria aimed at identifying concise SLE syndromes as research objects. Can a systems science approach solve this problem?

A Review of Lawson Criterion for Nuclear Fusion

In the pursuit for abundant clean energy from nuclear fusion, the Lawson Criterion is cited by fusion researchers and experimentalists as the condition to exceed for fusion of atomic nuclei to occur. In his 1955 paper J.D. Lawson analyzed a fusion plasma conforming to thermodynamic principles at steadystate but with stated omissions and simplifications. Modern fusion researchers developed many incantations of the Lawson Criterion urging their brand leads to fusion ignition, necessarily to sell a rational fusion hypothesis and attract research funding. Others have shown how confined fusion in the laboratory cannot satisfy a positive energy balance due to energy losses from the system. A literature search for "fusion energy balance" shows a suspicious absence of this sanity-check to verify the energy condition was met. This paper applies conservation of energy from classical thermodynamics to a fusion plasma and summarizes eleven modern Lawson-like interpretations in a uniform way, doing so shows the requirements for fusion ignition are not met. Indeed despite billions of speculative dollars spent, sustained laboratory fusion has not been demonstrated in any experimental apparatus built and tested to date worldwide. Heed the warning, in 1955 John D. Lawson wrote: “To conclude we emphasize that these conditions, though necessary are far from sufficient. The working cycle that has been assumed is very optimistic.”

Empirical Research on the Impact of Open Fund Sheep Behavior on Stock Price Volatility

In the past, economic research took the “rational man hypothesis” as the premise, but in reality, this premise is difficult to hold. In a large number of financial practices, a large number of special phenomena that are inconsistent with standard financial theory have emerged. Behavioral finance is premised on the assumption of irrational people, and herd behavior is a relatively special irrational behavior. It refers to the behavior of investors who are influenced by other investors when the information environment is uncertain, imitate other people’s decisions, or rely too much on public opinion without considering their own information. Sheep behavior is a related behavior involving multiple investment entities, which has a great impact on the stability and efficiency of the market, and is also closely related to the financial crisis. Therefore, herd behavior has attracted widespread attention from academia, investment and financial supervision.China’s capital market started late. In 1990, the Shanghai Stock Exchange was established, marking the birth of China’s stock market, the distribution of market investors have changed again and again, unchanged is that the behavior of investment subjects has a strong similarity, at the same time, China’s fund market has persistent fluctuations.Whether there is a causal connection, this paper will focus on the development of China’s fund market, use LSV model and VAR test method to test and analyze the fund and stock trading data of Shanghai and Shenzhen from the first quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2022, and empirically study whether there is significant herd behavior in China’s open-end funds. On this basis, the impact of stock investment herd behavior on stock price volatility is empirically studied.Finally, according to the research conclusion, from the three aspects of investor investment rationality, the effectiveness of capital market and the optimization of market structure, suggestions on how to reduce the impact of the herd effect and the healthy and sustainable development in the future.

Enterococci carbonic anhydrase inhibition.

Carbonic anhydrase metalloenzymes are encoded in genomes throughout all kingdoms of life with a conserved function catalyzing the reversible conversion of CO2 to bicarbonate. Carbonic anhydrases have been well-investigated in humans, but are still relatively understudied in bacterial organisms, including Enterococci. Studies over the past decade have presented bacterial carbonic anhydrases as potential drug targets, with some chemical scaffolds potently inhibiting the Enterococcus carbonic anhydrases in vitro and displaying antimicrobial efficacy against Enterococcus organisms. While carbonic anhydrases in Enterococci still have much to be explored, hypotheses may be drawn from similar Gram-positive organisms for which known information exists about carbonic anhydrase function and relevance. Within this chapter is reported information and rational hypotheses regarding the subcellar locations, potential physiological roles, essentiality, structures, and kinetics of carbonic anhydrases in Enterococci.

On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments

ABSTRACT Subjects experiencing thought insertion disown thoughts they are introspectively aware of. According to what I call “the rationality hypothesis”, thought-insertion reports are not merely intelligible, but also express, or potentially express, fully rational judgments in the light of highly disruptive experience. I argue that the hypothesis is ethically and theoretically motivated, and provides two insights into the philosophical significance of reports by subjects with schizophrenia. First, the reports can be seen as evidence that rational judgments of ownership of a thought prioritize agency awareness over introspective awareness of it. This point fits with an integrative account of thought insertion at the personal and mechanistic levels. Second, rational and competent uses of the first person purely based on introspection do not necessarily involve a full-fledged first-person perspective over one’s thoughts. This suggests that agency awareness, and not introspection as such, is primarily involved in determining the reference of the first person featuring in the judgments.

Review of COVID-19 Pandemics Impact on Investment Decisions under Behavioral Finance

Since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, many studies have explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial markets and investors decisions. Most of the studies are conducted under the assumption of rationality and efficient market hypothesis, which imply that investors decisions are always aiming at the maximum profit. However, analyses of investors behaviors during the pandemic with a focus on irrationality are not common. Irrationality is the main theme of behavioral finance, which studies the psychological factors that bias investors decisions from rationality. This paper reviews common theories and biases studied in behavioral finance, including heuristics, mental accounting, disposition effects, overconfidence, and anchoring. In this paper, those concepts are linked to the increased volatility and strikes in financial markets during the pandemic. By analyzing the relationship between behavioral finance concepts, hypotheses are given regarding the impact of the pandemic on increase or decrease of the common irrational behaviors in the financial markets, especially in the stock market.

Cost of effort in benchmarking: exploration and applications

The literature on incentives suggests that the cost of effort is a key determinant of production, as an agent’s utility is dependent on both consumption and the cost of effort. However, the benchmarking literature has neglected to consider the cost of effort in performance improvement, as it primarily focuses on selecting best-practice benchmarks for underperforming agents. This paper aims to bridge these two literatures by examining the cost of effort in benchmarking and its applications. Our approach is a direct extension of the rational inefficiency hypothesis. We use the information of slacks regarding technology to make inference about the cost of effort in benchmarking. Importantly, we show that inference about the cost of effort gives new sights into activity planning, incentive provision, and employee layoffs. Our analysis provides a new explanation for benchmarking failure in business practices. It also contributes to the rational inefficiency hypothesis by revealing that inefficiency can be beneficial in benchmarking since it can be regarded as a form of fringe reimbursement provided to stakeholders to offset the cost of effort.

The role of rational decisions in technical inefficiency analysis of Spanish pig farms: The influence of water use management

There has been limited research on the degree to which rational inefficiency arises when environmental factors are considered. Thus, our goal is to contribute to the literature by applying the concept of rational inefficiency to pig farming and investigating the relationship between water use and farm technical efficiency levels. This research aims to provide a better understanding of the complex interactions between pig farming production, the natural environment, and economic performance. The stochastic frontier analysis is applied to a cross-section dataset of 523 Catalan farms specialized in pig production in 2018. The main findings of this study are as follows: First, Catalan pig farming exhibits high levels of technical efficiency with an average score of 0.94, which is consistent with the high intensity and concentration of Spanish pork production. Second, there is no compelling evidence to support the rational inefficiency hypothesis, particularly when comparing the rational efficient and multi-efficient groups.

Testing rational hypotheses in signaling games

We introduce a solution concept for signaling games, called Rational Hypothesis Testing Equilibrium (RHTE). Beliefs are updated via Ortoleva’s (2012) Hypothesis Testing model, allowing for conditioning on information sets off the path. Hypotheses are conjectures by the uninformed player about opponent’s strategies that rationalize sending an unexpected message. Each RHTE is a Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium, but not vice versa. RHTE features a number of desirable properties: First, beliefs are structurally consistent in the spirit of Kreps and Wilson (1982). Second, beliefs are consistent with mutual knowledge of rationality. Third, RHTE can be related to the prominent refinement concepts, including the Intuitive Criterion, strategic stability, and undefeated equilibrium. In the Spence game, RHTE restricts the admissible wages, significantly reducing the number of equilibria. Finally, we show that our equilibrium notion offers an alternative explanation for the experimental results in Brandts and Holt (1992, 1993).

Game analysis of product specifications for design optimisation using big sales data

Product specifications that precisely describe customers’ preference for product comparison and purchase decision-making are critical to product competitiveness. Competitive specifications’ determination requires a better understanding of the comparison-oriented product competition mechanism. Big sales data that consist of comprehensive and multi-dimensional datasets of products are valuable sources for the investigation of the specification competition mechanism. In this work, the relative satisfaction hypothesis and rational comparison hypothesis are proposed on the basis of product competition analysis. A framework is proposed to support rational design decisions in the context of competitiveness-oriented design optimisation. This framework is based on game analysis of product specifications using big sales data. Initially, competing products in the market are collected and modelled for game analysis. To monitor the competition mechanism of specifications amongst competing products, the relative satisfaction is then defined to evaluate the comparison results of product specifications. By comparing different specifications and their combinations, four design scenarios (i.e. dominant, dominated, equivalent and mixed design) are identified for design evaluation. Similarities amongst specifications are considered for supporting both homogeneous and differentiated competition. Ultimately, a bi-level optimisation model is proposed for enhancing product competitiveness. A case study illustrates the implementation of the proposed method.

Multi-Agent Evolutionary Game Strategy for Ecotourism Development in National Parks: A Case Study of Wuyishan National Park

This paper proposes a multi-agent evolutionary game model that can be used to study sustainable ecotourism development in national parks, with a focus placed on coordinating the interests of multiple stakeholders. Based on the limited rationality hypothesis, this study explores the impact of strategic choice evolution and the change of key factors on the stability of the ecotourism development system in national parks. To achieve this, a tripartite evolutionary game model involving “local government–tourism enterprises–tourists” is constructed. The model is applied to Wuyishan National Park as a case study, incorporating actual data and conducting numerical simulation experiments using MATLAB software. The findings of the study are as follows: (1) The optimal stable strategy for the three game players (local government, tourism enterprises, and tourists) is determined to be one that works to “supervise, implement high-level services, and participate in ecotourism”, respectively. This strategy is influenced by factors such as government subsidies, government fines, economic benefits obtained by tourism enterprises at different service levels, and the utilities experienced by participating and non-participating tourists in national park ecotourism. (2) Government subsidy policies can promote the attainment of a stable state for tourism enterprises and tourists. However, excessive subsidies may hinder the fulfillment of local governments’ expectations. (3) The greater the economic benefits obtained by tourism enterprises through high-level services are, the more favorable it will be for tourism enterprises to reach a stable state. However, this may lead to a relatively slower response from the government. (4) The higher the utilities that tourists derive from high-level services in ecotourism are, the faster the game players will reach a stable state. (5) The higher the utilities associated with tourists spending time in other places are, the more challenging it becomes for the three game players to achieve a stable state. This situation may cause tourists to shift from the initial strategy of “participating in ecotourism” to “not participating in ecotourism”. Based on these findings, the paper provides countermeasures and suggestions for promoting the sustainable development of ecotourism in Wuyishan National Park. These recommendations aim to offer decision-making references for enhancing the development of ecotourism in national parks across the country.

Participation in Polish Local Elections: Sheer Rational Choice or Social Embeddedness Fate?

In this article, a modest attempt is undertaken to connect the rational choice theory mechanism with the sociological theory of voting, as efforts to juxtapose both theories are still rare, although some cited accomplishments offer interesting insights. Our dependent variable is participation in a local election in Poland. The local government elections in Poland seem to offer a setting particularly well-suited for a test of the rational choice hypothesis and its relation to sociological explanations of voting behavior. The essential contribution of the article derives from our conviction that social embeddedness and rooting into the social milieu and local community matter for both the cost of participating in a local election and the cost of deciding whether to participate. In the world of post-cleavage politics, individualization of political behavior and involvement in (new) social networks play an increasingly important role. The general finding can be summarized as follows: the social embeddedness of citizens does enhance the probability of participation in an election; however, it does not substitute for the impact of rational motivation factors, nor does it significantly decrease the latter’s net impact on our dependent variable.

An Empirical Study on The Calendar Effect of The Shanghai Index in China

The premise of traditional financial theory is efficient market theory and rational man hypothesis, while the market anomaly which can not be explained by traditional financial theory such as the calendar effect poses a great challenge to traditional financial theory. This paper uses the daily closing price data of the Shanghai Composite Index from December 19, 1999, to May 6, 2022, to investigate the calendar effect of the logarithmic return of the Shanghai Composite Index. The research results show that China's Shenzhen stock market is inefficient and has a negative Tuesday effect, which empirically proves the non-efficiency of China's stock market and the calendar effect in behavioral finance in China's stock market.

Lexical prediction does not rationally adapt to prediction error: ERP evidence from pre-nominal articles

People sometimes predict upcoming words during language comprehension, but debate remains on when and to what extent such predictions indeed occur. The rational adaptation hypothesis holds that predictions develop with expected utility: people predict more strongly when predictions are frequently confirmed (low prediction error) rather than disconfirmed. However, supporting evidence is mixed thus far and has only involved measuring responses to supposedly predicted nouns, not to preceding articles that may also be predicted. The current, large-sample (N = 200) ERP study on written discourse comprehension in Dutch therefore employs the well-known ‘pre-nominal prediction effect’: enhanced N400-like ERPs for articles that are unexpected given a likely upcoming noun’s gender (i.e., the neuter gender article ‘het’ when people expect the common gender noun phrase ‘de krant’, the newspaper) compared to expected articles. We investigated whether the pre-nominal prediction effect is larger when most of the presented stories contain predictable article-noun combinations (75% predictable, 25% unpredictable) compared to when most stories contain unpredictable combinations (25% predictable, 75% unpredictable). Our results show the pre-nominal prediction effect in both contexts, with little evidence to suggest that this effect depended on the percentage of predictable combinations. Moreover, the little evidence suggesting such a dependence was primarily observed for unexpected, neuter-gender articles (‘het’), which is inconsistent with the rational adaptation hypothesis. In line with recent demonstrations (Nieuwland, 2021a,b), our results suggest that linguistic prediction is less ‘rational’ or Bayes optimal than is often suggested.

The very idea of rational irrationality

I am interested in the “rational irrationality hypothesis” about voter behavior. According to this hypothesis, voters regularly vote for policies that are contrary to their interests because the act of voting for them isn’t. Gathering political information is time-consuming and inconvenient. Doing so is unlikely to lead to positive results since one's vote is unlikely to be decisive. However, we have preferences over our political beliefs. We like to see ourselves as members of certain groups (e.g. “rugged individualists”) and being part of those groups depends on having certain beliefs (e.g. about welfare spending). Even if a decrease in welfare spending would be bad for me, I might still benefit by believing in and, consequently, voting for a decrease since my vote is unlikely to make a difference but getting to see myself as a rugged individualist will make a noticeable difference to my wellbeing. It is sometimes argued that this hypothesis fails for empirical reasons. I will argue that things are worse: it is conceptually incoherent. I will do so by first showing that it is a rationalizing explanation and then argue that rationalizing explanations must be reflectively stable from the agent's perspective. The rational irrationality hypothesis is not.

Stakeholder theory, risk-taking and firm performance

PurposeThis study, using stakeholder approach, aims to examine the impact of corporate governance and risk-taking on the performance of the top 100 nonfinancial listed firms in Vietnam from 2015 to 2019.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical and empirical studies are reviewed for rational hypotheses development. Firm performance is represented by return on assets, return on equity and Tobin’s Q.FindingsSpecifically, concentrated ownership structure, large workforce, being a great workplace, quick sales growth, high receivables turnover, being funded by both the state and foreigners and high-risk exposure positively affect firm performance. However, a high level of state ownership or foreign ownership, more independent members on board, large board size and chief executive officer (CEO) duality show an inverse effect. Besides, an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm performance is recognized for liquidity ratios.Originality/valueThis study uses three triangles, including governance, risk, and performance. The paper offers some evidence-based recommendations to improve firm performance in Vietnamese businesses.

Bernanke and Kindleberger on financial crises, 1978–2003

Abstract Ben Bernanke and Charles Kindleberger both studied financial crises. One interpretation in monetary macroeconomics associates them over their endorsement of the credit view as opposed to the money view. We suggest another interpretation and compare their contributions on financial crises more closely. This comparison makes all the more sense as the two authors were engaged in a discussion that the literature has not studied in depth, but that forms the Ariadne’s thread of our investigation. We show that the difference did not so much concern the distinction between rationality and irrationality hypothesis, or between policy and market failure, as the distinction between exogeneity and endogeneity of financial crises. Bernanke rested on the assumption of any kind of exogenous shocks and studied their effects on credit intermediation, whereas Kindleberger analysed credit intermediation throughout the financial cycle and pointed out the causes of financial crises as the culmination of the endogenous process.

Managerial Competence and Corporate Financialization

Along with the downward pressure of domestic and foreign economies, some real enterprises deviate from their main business to allocate financial assets, and the funds flowing to the real economy sector keep decreasing, which to some extent crowds out the enterprises' investment in their main business and may lead to the financialization of enterprises. This paper incorporates managerial competence under the rationality hypothesis into the analytical framework and examines the impact of managerial competence traits on corporate financialization using Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020 as the research sample. It is found that managerial competence significantly promotes corporate financialization, mainly in terms of increasing short-term financial asset allocation, which provides some reference and reference for real enterprises to make reasonable investment decisions.

Probabilistic coherence, logical consistency, and Bayesian learning: Neural language models as epistemic agents.

It is argued that suitably trained neural language models exhibit key properties of epistemic agency: they hold probabilistically coherent and logically consistent degrees of belief, which they can rationally revise in the face of novel evidence. To this purpose, we conduct computational experiments with rankers: T5 models [Raffel et al. 2020] that are pretrained on carefully designed synthetic corpora. Moreover, we introduce a procedure for eliciting a model's degrees of belief, and define numerical metrics that measure the extent to which given degrees of belief violate (probabilistic, logical, and Bayesian) rationality constraints. While pretrained rankers are found to suffer from global inconsistency (in agreement with, e.g., [Jang et al. 2021]), we observe that subsequent self-training on auto-generated texts allows rankers to gradually obtain a probabilistically coherent belief system that is aligned with logical constraints. In addition, such self-training is found to have a pivotal role in rational evidential learning, too, for it seems to enable rankers to propagate a novel evidence item through their belief systems, successively re-adjusting individual degrees of belief. All this, we conclude, confirms the Rationality Hypothesis, i.e., the claim that suitable trained NLMs may exhibit advanced rational skills. We suggest that this hypothesis has empirical, yet also normative and conceptual ramifications far beyond the practical linguistic problems NLMs have originally been designed to solve.