Publisher:
Duke University, Center for the History of Political Economy (CHOPE), Durham, NC
Abstract:
This work identifies the intellectual influences that supported Hayek's computational perspective as well as recognition that Hayek received from computational theorists in the decades following the publication of The Sensory Order. Having outlined Hayek's computational approach, I argue that 1) recognition of the approach suggests that agent-based computation is a natural extension of Hayek's work, 2) that a computational perspective helps should revise our interpretation of Kirzner's critique that Hayek's agent is a Robbinsean maximizer, and 3) that we should be careful not to reduce description of human decision-making to the structure provided by models of artificial intelligence, useful as these might be.