Economics and Language: Five Essays

Churchill Lectures in Economics

by Ariel Rubinstein

Arising out of the author's lifetime fascination with the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language, this short book comprises five essays investigating both the economics of language and the language of economics. Ariel Rubinstein touches on the structure imposed on binary relations in daily language, the evolutionary development of the meaning of words, game-theoretical considerations of pragmatics, the language of economic agents and the rhetoric of game theory. These short essays are full of challenging ideas for social scientists that should help to encourage a fundamental rethinking of many of the underlying assumptions in economic theory and game theory.

Genres: Economics

140 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 1996

About the author

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Ru...

Reviews

[Misha Y.]

* Theory of the first chapters doesn't seem very plausible to me.
* I liked his explanation of the pragmatics of a debate.
* I liked his explanation of Nash's bargaining solution.
* Discussion of applicability/usefulness of game theory is good.

[P]

This short and highly technical work should be titled “Complex Math and Formal Logic.”