Daniel Kahneman, who died on March 27, represents a rather unique case in the world of contemporary researchers who have significantly advanced economic knowledge. The Israeli-American is first of all the first to have received, in 2002, the Nobel Prize in economics without being an economist in the academic sense of the term, since he himself admitted never having formally followed an teaching in this discipline. His initial training was psychology and, to a lesser degree, mathematics.
The starting point of his research with his colleague and friend Amos Tversky (1937-1996) concerns the analysis of individual choices in situations of uncertainty, approached from the perspective of experimental psychology. But the two authors worked, as a priority, to compare the results of their experiments, real or simulated, with the theoretical constructions developed by economists. mainstream. They then outlined an alternative critical approach to this central economic question (“Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk”, Econometrica No. 47, 1979).
We will observe, moreover, that the Frenchman Maurice Allais (1911-2010), himself a Nobel Prize winner in economics, in 1988, had already highlighted the failure of a purely statistical theory of this type of choice, the occasion of a famous experiment in which, among others, Leonard Savage (1917-1971), one of the founders of this theory (“The behavior of rational man in the face of risk: criticism of the postulates and axioms of the American school”, Econometrica No. 21, 1953). In this experiment, the subjects were successively confronted with two pairs of different situations, each characterized by probabilities associated with them. The result obtained showed that their choices thus expressed turned out to be irrational according to statistical logic.
Kahneman’s main economic contribution to this question is undoubtedly to have demonstrated that choice in a situation of uncertainty is not the result of a simple linear calculation, whatever its complexity, but that of the meeting of two distinct mental operations which succeed one another and are articulated with each other: firstly the framing (“framing”), which organizes the choice situation posed to the decision-maker by selecting and prioritizing its main necessarily subjective dimensions, before proceeding with the calculation (computation) which is then applied to it. A perspective which makes it possible to directly introduce the consideration of cognitive biases at the heart of the microeconomic analysis of individual choices.
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