Contingency in economic decision-making

Abstract

Contingency in economic decision-making. – The essay shows the role of contingency in economic decision-making in the frame of market economy, presents the selected problems related to the introduction of contingency into the decision-making and defines the opportunities and limits of their solving. The market, which is so far considered the most perfect of known economic regulators by the majority of economists from various economic schools and streams of economic thinking, is able to automatically provide a great amount of information via prices, which is important for economic decision-making of individual economic subjects in the current situation. But the market is not and it will never be able to provide such information that could serve as a base for future-oriented decision making.

This brings a high level of contingency to economic decisions, which we make with respect to the future. None of solutions so far suggested by the economists brought wholly satisfying results. Therefore the success of our future-oriented economic decisions will be always to certain extent arbitrary, because it will be based on speculative presumption of future market changes. It will be based not only on our existing experience, knowledge, horizon and combinational capability, and our technical and administrative base, but also – and primarily – on our intuition, on the willingness to risk and to certain extent on arbitrary creation of beneficial circumstances.