Economics as it is got going well before complexity theory was established. There's an interesting difference between assuming perfect information and perfect

Economics as it is got going well before complexity theory was established. There's an interesting difference between assuming perfect information and perfect rationality -- idealizations of existing scenarios -- and essentially assuming P=NP; the former makes the math easier at no real penalty (provided you remember not to confuse the map with the territory) but until P is proven to be equal to NP (which probably won't happen) the latter is more like sprinkling pixy dust to make it go. The only school that really takes something like tractability seriously are the Austrians, but their math phobia leaves their approach unrigorous and not very useful outside of as an anti-central-planning argument. The claim that a market will converge on an accurate price (!) for an "intractable" financial asset is pretty dubious; the price-discovery process is supposed to depend on lots of agents running their #s and taking positions depending on if they think current price is different than it ought to be...over time this process will push the market price toward an accurate price. In the case of an intractable asset there'd be no reason to believe that any outside agents crunched accurate #s, which means that even if the price converged there'd be no reason to believe that the converged-to price had any accuracy, which isn't usually the case in most other classes of financial assets. As noted towards the end they need to do some work about estimating "lemon cost" and otherwise establishing how close you can estimate with approximate methods. (!) In general there's not much sense in talking about true or accurate prices for some good; price is what it gets, full stop. In the case of most financial products the notion of accurate price is more justified: a product entitles the owner to some sequence of future cash flows, which can be assigned a value in some straightforward manner. When a financial asset's current price deviates from the value of the underlying sequence of payments in some substantial way it's usually due to some easily-understood dynamic (eg: inflation expectations, doubts about some of the payments coming through) which makes a minor correction to the price it fetches. An "inaccurate price" would be one with no apparent relation to the underlying cash flows.