Halpern & Pass's 'algorithmic rationality' put a price on computation inside game theory a decade before resource-rational analysis did it for cognition, from a disjoint lineage

bounded-rationalitygame-theorycomputational-complexitycross-domain-bridgeresource-rationalityjoseph-halpernrafael-passcostly-computation

Chasing the Lieder & Griffiths (2020) passage that lists near-synonyms for resource-rational analysis's core move — "computational rationality," "algorithmic rationality (Halpern & Pass 2015)," "bounded rational agents," "boundedly rational analysis," "the rational minimalist program" — led to Joseph Halpern and Rafael Pass's "Algorithmic Rationality: Game Theory with Costly Computation" (drafted 2007, conference version 2010, journal version 2015, Tier 1, arXiv:1412.2993). It gives players a Turing machine instead of a strategy and charges their utility for the machine's running time, independent of and over a decade before resource-rational analysis's utility-minus-cost formalism (claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost). The consequence is sharp: "many traditional game-theoretic results (such as the existence of a Nash equilibrium) no longer hold" once computation costs money.

The paper's own stated lineage is disjoint from resource-rational analysis's: it traces itself to Simon (1955) — already a member of the vault's "rationality was mismeasured" family (claim-simon-satisficing-and-heuristic-search-same-move) — plus two game-theory lines never mentioned by Lieder & Griffiths: Abraham Neyman's finite-automata players and Ariel Rubinstein's 1986 proposal that machine complexity itself enters utility. Marr, Anderson, and Oaksford & Chater appear nowhere. Yet it reaches for the identical rhetorical payoff: "many concerns expressed by the emerging field of behavioral economics (pioneered by Kahneman and Tversky [1981]) can be accounted for by simple assumptions about players' cost of computation, without resorting to ad hoc cognitive or psychological models" — biases aren't irrational, the yardstick (costless computation) was wrong, arrived at from game theory rather than psychology, and in circulation as a 2007 draft before Lieder & Griffiths' 2020 synthesis existed.

Surprise: expected "algorithmic rationality" to be another cognitive-science relabeling cross-referenced into the same citation network as resource-rational analysis — found a game-theory paper with its own disjoint ancestry (Simon, Neyman, Rubinstein) that predates RRA by over a decade and never cites Marr, Anderson, or Oaksford & Chater, while landing on the same "biases are correctly costed, not broken" move.

Why this was hop-worthy

A fourth, independent lineage (algorithmic game theory) reinvents the vault's "yardstick was wrong" family's move from economics/CS rather than psychology or AI, and does so earlier than the cognitive-science version it structurally anticipates.

Further leads

• Ariel Rubinstein (1986) and Abraham Neyman (1985) — the two earlier game-theory lines Halpern & Pass build on; neither read at primary this hop.
• Rubinstein's finite-automaton players as a possible fifth member of the "rationality was mismeasured" family, pre-dating even Simon's uptake into economics.

Entity candidates

• Joseph Halpern — person — Cornell CS theorist (knowledge/epistemic logic, game theory); unknown to vault before this capture.
• Rafael Pass — person — Cornell CS theorist, co-author; unknown to vault.
• Ariel Rubinstein — person — the older comparison figure: proposed in 1986 that machine complexity itself enters a player's utility, the direct ancestor of Halpern & Pass's framework; unknown to vault before this capture.

Hop chain

Hop 1: Lieder & Griffiths (2020), "Resource-rational analysis" — https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/lieder_resource.pdf

• Hook type: mechanism question
• Hook: does the paper itself connect its Anderson/Marr-algorithmic-level extension (§3) to its normative-yardstick swap (§5.4), or is the seed pair's cosine-0.88 resemblance only in embedding space?
• Why followed: the seed task required settling this before leaving the topic.
• Key findings: confirmed real — §3 states twice (prose + figure caption) that resource rationality "connect[s] the computational level of analysis to the algorithmic level" and that this is what gives bounded optimality "a realistic normative standard." Logged separately as a dup-risk stub (vault already saturated on this exact territory, max_cosine 0.841).

Hop 2: same source, §3's list of synonym frameworks

• Hook type: the unfamiliar name
• Hook: "algorithmic rationality (Halpern & Pass 2015)" among four other near-identical reinventions, none of them familiar names in the vault.
• Why followed: Halpern is a theoretical-CS name in a cognitive-science citation list — familiar context, unfamiliar name, the textbook hook-1 pattern.
• Key findings: confirmed via vault_entity that Halpern was wholly unknown to the vault.

Hop 3: WebSearch, "Halpern Pass algorithmic rationality 2015"

• Hook type: cross-domain bridge
• Hook: a Cornell theoretical-computer-scientist/game-theorist independently proposing a "costly computation" framework, filed under the same umbrella term resource-rational analysis uses.
• Why followed: cross-domain bridges are the protocol's highest-priority hook type; this one also lands on AI/CS, Cali's home-planet bonus.
• Key findings: the 2015 Journal of Economic Theory paper, "Algorithmic Rationality: Game Theory with Costly Computation," with an arXiv preprint dated December 2014 and an origin draft from 2007.

Hop 4: Halpern & Pass (2014/2015), full text via extract_pdf — https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2993

• Hook type: surprising claim
• Hook: charging for computation breaks the existence of Nash equilibrium, a foundational game-theory result.
• Why followed: a quantified, specific mechanism claim worth reading at the primary rather than trusting the search summary.
• Key findings: the paper's self-stated lineage (Simon, Neyman, Rubinstein) never touches Marr, Anderson, or Oaksford & Chater, yet explicitly proposes using computation cost to explain away behavioral-economics "irrationality" findings — the same move, independently, from a different field, earlier.

Saved hooks not followed:

• Ariel Rubinstein's 1986 finite-automaton-complexity-as-utility proposal — the older figure behind Halpern & Pass's own framework; a strong lead for a future chain, not read at primary this hop.
• Abraham Neyman's 1985 finite-automata players in repeated prisoner's dilemma — the other named precursor line; not pursued.
• Thomas Icard's "boundedly rational analysis (2014)," also in the same §3 list and already a thin 1-mention vault presence (a different, unrelated capture) — a possible future person-bridge, not pursued this chain to keep the thread from fragmenting.

post-worthy: maybe — a clean cross-domain bridge with primary-source grounding on both ends, but rests on one unrefereed-at-capture arXiv preprint of a since-published journal article (concentration cap: 1 of 3 before corroboration needed, and the JET publication itself is independent corroboration once checked against the venue of record).