Fundamentally Uncertain World: Max Planck Institute of Economics

International Max Planck Research School on Adapting Behaviour in a Fundamentally Uncertain World

Explicitly or implicitly, most research on decision-making assumes a fairly certain world. Yet in reality, most decisions are made without knowledge of all the relevant facts. Moreover, even if all the needed information was available, having to process it would overwhelm the cognitive abilities of decision-makers.

Furthermore, considerations become more complex in an interactive context, when decision-makers are boundedly rational.

The Uncertainty School spans three disciplines:

economics, psychology and law. On its own, none of these disciplines is competent to generate a truly meaningful understanding of behaviour in a fundamentally uncertain world. In psychology, there is important knowledge on how subjects react to perceived fundamental uncertainty. However, most of this knowledge is confined to situations that are free from strategic interaction and institutional boundaries. Likewise, there is substantial theoretical and experimental knowledge about strategic interaction in economics. Nevertheless, it usually has been generated assuming a fairly certain world and psychologically naive individual behaviour. Finally, legal scholars and their companions from institutional analysis and design have generated a vast body of knowledge on the comparative performance of institutions. But, the more conceptually rigorous this work, the more unrealistic the assumptions made.

The Uncertainty School seeks to provide a framework to combine the strengths of the research approaches in economics, psychology and law in order to allow for a more adequate explanation of human decision-making behaviour under uncertainty.

Application Deadline
Please check their website

• http://www.imprs.econ.mpg.de/application/