Can you really regard people as rational calculators if their decisions are influenced by random numbers?
Rational calculators are supposed to consider their options, then pick the one that maximizes the benefit to them.
Individual voters are not rational calculators of self-interest (nobody truly is), and may not be very consistent users of heuristic shortcuts, either.
Both of them, they are not concerned with the kind of axiomatic reasoning where you start with human beings assumed to have rational calculators inside them.
In decisions from how much to produce to whether to save and invest, humans have been assumed to be coolly rational calculators of their own self-interest.
This error is compounded by assuming that individuals are pure rational calculators without emotional attachments to others around them who enter into social cooperation only for personal gain.
And while you might think the possibility of exploiting an untapped market could trump personal bias for entrepreneurs, Marina Adshade, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics and author of a book on sex and economics, notes that research shows investors are far from the rational calculators we think they are, and that stigma can drive their decisions as much as the pursuit of profit.
People sometimes think of President Obama as a cool, hyper-rational calculator, but in this case he was motivated by a noble, open-hearted sentiment: that the U.S. cannot sit by and watch tens of thousands of people get massacred when it has the means to prevent it.
And within economics itself, we were keen to incorporate insights from recent research in "behavioral" economics – in other words, looking at how humans actually behave, with all our cognitive biases and failures, rather than how economists generally assume we behave, which is as rational, maximizing calculators.
This assumes, however, that criminals are rational cost-benefit calculators.
