Explicitly or implicitly, most research on decision-making assumes a fairly certain world. Yet in reality, most decisions are made without knowledge of all the relevant facts. Moreover, even if all the required information were available, having to process it would overwhelm the cognitive abilities of decision-makers. Furthermore, considerations become more complex in an interactive context, when
decision-makers apply bounded rationality. The Uncertainty School spans three disciplines: economics, psychology and law. On its own, none of these disciplines is competent to generate a truly meaningful understanding of behaviour in a fundamentally uncertain world. In psychology, important knowledge exists on how subjects react to perceived fundamental uncertainty. However, most of this knowledge is confined to situations that are free from strategic interaction and institutional boundaries. Likewise, there is substantial theoretical and experimental knowledge on strategic interaction in economics. Nevertheless, it has usually been generated assuming a fairly certain world and psychologically naive individual behaviour. Finally, legal scholars and their companions from institutional analysis and design have generated a vast body of knowledge on the comparative performance of institutions. But the more conceptually rigorous this work, the more unrealistic the assumptions made. The Uncertainty School seeks to provide a framework to combine the strengths of the research approaches in economics, psychology and law in order to allow for a more adequate explanation of human decision-making behaviour under uncertainty.
