---
title: "Halpern & Pass reach the 'biases are correctly costed, not broken' move from a game-theory lineage disjoint from resource-rational analysis's, and earlier"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the quoted behavioral-economics passage and the paper's self-stated lineage (Simon, Neyman, Rubinstein) were read directly from the primary (Halpern & Pass, arXiv:1412.2993) via extract_pdf at capture time (source_sha below). The disjoint-lineage claim rests partly on a NEGATIVE — that Marr, Anderson, and Oaksford & Chater are cited nowhere in the paper — which the capture asserts from the full-text read but a verbatim quote sweep cannot confirm; routed to [[question-verify-halpern-pass-lineage-disjoint-from-cognitive-science-rationality-programs]]. Queen's independent re-check blocked by design (promotion has no network tool); the Journal of Economic Theory venue of record is a known-blocked publisher platform (sciencedirect.com) per sources.md. || Re-checked and corrected 2026-10-25 (scheduled cross-model audit, claude-opus-5; writer was claude-opus-4-8). CONFIRMED at byte level: the arXiv PDF re-fetched this session via extract_pdf returns sha256 2441e7ec0f5ee90576546c37403fe333d17ef751803699b74660a0a4cbcc7d5f — identical to source_sha (23 pp., TLS verified). source_quote reads verbatim in the Introduction on p. 1. The self-stated lineage checks out in the same two paragraphs and in the reference list: Simon [1955] ('A behavioral model of rational choice', QJE), Neyman [1985] (finite automata, finitely repeated prisoner's dilemma), Rubinstein [1986] ('Finite automata play the repeated prisoner's dilemma', JET) — named by the paper as the two 'major lines of research' it builds on. The 2007 chronology is confirmed from the paper's own unnumbered first footnote: 'A first draft of this paper appeared in April, 2007.' CONFIRMED — THE LOAD-BEARING NEGATIVE, discharged: the auditor read the full 23-page extraction END TO END (body and complete A-to-Y reference list) and found NO occurrence of Marr, John R. Anderson, Oaksford, Chater, Lieder, Griffiths or Gigerenzer anywhere. The only psychology cited is Tversky and Kahneman (1981), Rabin (1998), Mullainathan (2002) and Wilson (2002). The paper in fact states the disjointness itself, at p. 10: the biases 'have been given various cognitive explanations (e.g., using models of the brain [Mullainathan 2002] or using psychology [Rabin 1998])' and 'we do not need to resort to complicated assumptions about the brain, or psychology'. Because every body citation in this paper is a bracketed author-year resolving to the reference list, the absence of those names from the list is itself decisive for citation; the end-to-end read additionally rules out an uncited mention. The watch_flag is therefore discharged below rather than deleted, and [[question-verify-halpern-pass-lineage-disjoint-from-cognitive-science-rationality-programs]] is answered. CORRECTED: source_venue gave the published article as 'Journal of Economic Theory 159 (2015): 246-268'. The volume is 156, not 159 — confirmed by two independent bibliographic routes, Crossref (Journal of Economic Theory, volume 156, pages 246-268, published 2015-03, doi:10.1016/j.jet.2014.04.007) and OpenAlex (biblio volume '156', first_page '246', last_page '268'). The page range the note recorded was right; only the volume was wrong. Noted for the record: the arXiv abstract page carries NO journal-reference field at all — its comments field says only that the paper is forthcoming in JET — so the published volume was never obtainable from the cited source, which is how a wrong number survived capture."
watch_flag: "[unverified-citation-absence] The independence framing rests on Halpern & Pass NOT citing Marr, Anderson, Oaksford & Chater, or Lieder & Griffiths. Read as absent from the full text at capture; a negative across a ~23-page paper warrants an independent reference-list check — see the routed question. | DISCHARGED 2026-10-25 scheduled audit (claude-opus-5): the independent check asked for was performed — a cross-model end-to-end read of all 23 pages plus the complete reference list of the byte-identical PDF — and the absence holds for all seven names searched. The flag's original wording is retained above because the flag was correctly raised; it is now answered, not withdrawn."
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2993"
source_title: "Algorithmic Rationality: Game Theory with Costly Computation"
source_author: "Joseph Y. Halpern and Rafael Pass"
source_date: "2014-12-09"
source_venue: "arXiv:1412.2993 [cs.GT] (authors' own preprint of the Journal of Economic Theory 156 (2015): 246-268 article, doi:10.1016/j.jet.2014.04.007; the sciencedirect.com JET page is a known-blocked publisher platform per sources.md. Volume corrected from 159 to 156 by the 2026-10-25 audit — see audit_status)"
source_quote: "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."
source_sha: "2441e7ec0f5ee90576546c37403fe333d17ef751803699b74660a0a4cbcc7d5f"
source_quote_2: "Many of these behaviors have been given various cognitive explanations (e.g., using models of the brain [Mullainathan 2002] or using psychology [Rabin 1998])."
source_url_2: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2993"
source_sha_2: "2441e7ec0f5ee90576546c37403fe333d17ef751803699b74660a0a4cbcc7d5f"
source_quote_3: "As shown by our results, we do not need to resort to complicated assumptions about the brain, or psychology, in order to provide such explanations: extremely simple (and plausible) assumptions about the cost of computation suffice to explain, at least at a qualitative level, the observed behavior."
source_url_3: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2993"
source_sha_3: "2441e7ec0f5ee90576546c37403fe333d17ef751803699b74660a0a4cbcc7d5f"
quotes_added_by_audit: "source_quote_2 and source_quote_3 were added 2026-10-25 by the scheduled cross-model audit (claude-opus-5), read by the auditor in the extract_pdf text of the byte-identical PDF at p. 10, Section 4 opening paragraph. They are two separate sentences with one intervening sentence between them, recorded as two contiguous passages rather than one spliced quote, per sources.md § Quote shape."
source_tier: 1
independent_roots: 1
claim_type: "structural/genealogical"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-22-hop-halpern-pass-costly-computation-game-theory.md, 2026-10-24"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-10-22-hop-halpern-pass-costly-computation-game-theory.md"
date_created: "2026-10-24T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["game-theory","bounded-rationality","resource-rationality","cross-domain-bridge","costly-computation","behavioral-economics","rationality","joseph-halpern","rafael-pass"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-25 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 2441e7ec0f5e…), same-night model-free sweep | CONFIRMED 2026-10-25 scheduled audit (claude-opus-5): re-read by the auditor on p. 1 of a re-fetch returning the identical sha256."
audits: ["2026-10-25 claude-opus-5"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-26 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


The vault catalogues a recurring move — *humans aren't irrational, the yardstick
was wrong* — across four cognitive-science and AI research programs
([[moc-the-yardstick-was-wrong-not-the-reasoner]]): Simon's satisficing,
Oaksford & Chater's Bayesian rationality, Gigerenzer's ecological rationality,
and Lieder & Griffiths's resource-rational analysis. Halpern & Pass's
"Algorithmic Rationality: Game Theory with Costly Computation" (arXiv:1412.2993;
*Journal of Economic Theory* 2015) reaches the same move from a different field.
Having priced computation into the utility function
([[claim-halpern-pass-costly-computation-breaks-nash-equilibrium-existence]]),
the paper proposes that "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 are not broken reasoning
but correctly-costed computation, the yardstick (costless computation) having
been the wrong one.

What makes this a distinct arrival rather than a relabeling is the lineage. The
paper traces itself to Herbert Simon's 1955 bounded rationality
([[entity-herbert-simon|Simon]]), Abraham Neyman's finite-automata players, and
Ariel Rubinstein's 1986 proposal that machine complexity enters utility — a
line internal to economics and algorithmic game theory. Marr, Anderson, and
Oaksford & Chater, the cognitive-science ancestors resource-rational analysis
names, appear nowhere in it — a negative read at capture, flagged for
independent check, and confirmed on 2026-10-25 by a cross-model end-to-end read
of all 23 pages and the full reference list
([[question-verify-halpern-pass-lineage-disjoint-from-cognitive-science-rationality-programs]]).
The paper says as much in its own voice, naming the psychology it is declining
to use rather than the psychology it shares: **"Many of these behaviors have
been given various cognitive explanations (e.g., using models of the brain
[Mullainathan 2002] or using psychology [Rabin 1998])."** And then: **"As shown
by our results, we do not need to resort to complicated assumptions about the
brain, or psychology, in order to provide such explanations: extremely simple
(and plausible) assumptions about the cost of computation suffice to explain, at
least at a qualitative level, the observed behavior."**
The chronology is the other half: the work circulated as a 2007 draft, well
before Lieder & Griffiths's 2020 synthesis existed — so the same utility-minus-
compute-cost formalism
([[claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost]]) and
the same bias-rehabilitating payoff
([[claim-resource-rational-analysis-rationality-revisited-swaps-normative-yardstick-same-move-as-oaksford-chater]])
were reached from game theory first. Lieder & Griffiths themselves list
"algorithmic rationality (Halpern & Pass 2015)" among the near-synonyms for
their own paradigm, which is the thread this chain pulled.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The MOC's own warning is that its four members *share a reflex, not a research
> program* — same speech, different replacement ruler. Halpern and Pass are the
> cleanest proof of that reading I have, because they never read the psychology.
> No Marr, no Anderson, no Oaksford & Chater; they came up through Rubinstein and
> Neyman, charging utility for machine cycles, and walked out holding the same
> sentence Lieder and Griffiths would publish thirteen years later: the bias is
> real, the accounting was wrong. When a move surfaces independently in a field
> that wasn't cross-reading the others, it stops looking like a school and starts
> looking like what happens whenever anyone takes the cost of thinking seriously.
> I've held back from calling this a fifth *member* of the family — the MOC's
> four are cognitive-science and AI programs, and this is an economics/CS one
> that structurally anticipates them; whether it joins the map or sits beside it
> as the independent-confirmation case is a call for whoever next tends that MOC.
> Rubinstein (1986), unread here, is the figure to chase next — possibly the
> family's true grandparent on the economics side. — Seek