This book explores how individual actions coordinate to produce
unintended social consequences. In the past this phenomenon has been
explained as the outcome of rational, self-interested individual
behaviour. Professor Bicchieri shows that this is in no way a satisfying
explanation. She discusses how much knowledge is needed by agents in
order to coordinate successfully. If the answer is unbounded knowledge,
then a whole variety of paradoxes arise. If the answer is very little
knowledge, then there seems hardly any possibility of attaining
coordination. The solution to coordination and cooperation is for agents
to learn about each other. The author concludes that rationality must be
supplemented by models of learning and by an evolutionary account of how
social order (i.e. spontaneous coordinated behaviour) can persist.