IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/pshchp/978-3-319-94084-7_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Players of the Game: Rationality, Choice, and Indeterminacy

In: The New Institutionalist Economic History of Douglass C. North

Author

Listed:
  • Matthijs Krul

    (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)

Abstract

One of the core elements in all of Douglass North’s work is his view of economic agents as ‘players of the game’ and institutions as the ‘rules of the game’. This chapter systematically analyzes how North uses these terms and in what ways he justifies this usage. As Krul argues, underlying this conception is an implicit game theoretical view of human society as a set of strategic interactions. However, for such models of social behavior to work, some fairly exacting technical criteria of rationality must be met. As Krul shows, North’s approach does not meet these, instead revealing fundamental ambiguity about just how rational agents are supposed to be. The result is that the ‘players of the game’ approach becomes indeterminate.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthijs Krul, 2018. "Players of the Game: Rationality, Choice, and Indeterminacy," Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought, in: The New Institutionalist Economic History of Douglass C. North, chapter 4, pages 101-136, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-319-94084-7_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-94084-7_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-319-94084-7_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.