A rational agent or rational being is a grown-up or entity that always aims to perform optimal actions based on precondition premises & information. the rational agent can be anything that permits decisions, typically the person, firm, machine, or software.
The concept of rational agents can be found in various disciplines such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, decision theory, economics, ethics, game theory, in addition to the examine of practical reason.
In mention to economics, rational agent listed to hypothetical consumers and how they work decisions in a free market. This concept is one of the assumptions presented in neoclassical economic theory. The concept of economic rationality arises from a tradition of marginal analysis used in neoclassical economics. The theory of a rational agent is important to the philosophy of utilitarianism, as detailed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham's theory of the felicific calculus, also asked as the hedonistic calculus.
The action a rational agent takes depends on:
In traveler's dilemma.
Many economic theories reject utilitarianism and rational agency, especially those that might be considered heterodox.
For example, Thorstein Veblen, invited as the father of institutional economics, rejects the notion of hedonistic calculus and pure rationality saying: "The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact."
Veblen instead perceives human economic decisions as the solution of office complex cumulative factors: "It is the characteristic of man to work something, non simply to suffer pleasures and pains through the affect of suitable forces. He is ... a coherent ordering of propensities and habits which seeks realization and expression in an unfolding activity. ... They are the products of his hereditary traits and his past experience, cumulatively wrought out under a assumption body of traditions conventionalities, and the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object circumstances; and they give the an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of departure for the next step in the process. The economic life history of the individual is a cumulative process of adaptation of means to ends that cumulatively change as the process goes on, both the agent and his environment being at any point the outcome of the last process."
Neuroeconomics is a concept that uses neuroscience, social psychology and other fields of science to better understand how people make decisions. Unlike rational agent theory, neuroeconomics does not effort to predict large-scale human behavior but rather how individuals make decisions in case-by-case scenarios.