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on History and Philosophy of Economics |
| By: | Davis, John B. (Department of Economics Marquette University) |
| Abstract: | This paper explains the continuing relevance of Keynes’s philosophical thinking in terms of his anticipation of complexity thinking in economics. It argues that that reflexivity is a central feature of the philosophical foundations of complexity theory, and shows that Keynes employed an understanding of reflexivity in both his philosophical and economic thinking. This argument is first developed in terms of his moral science conception of economics and General Theory beauty contest analysis. The paper advances a causal model that distinguishes direct causal relationships and reflexive feedback channels, uses this to distinguish Say’s Law economics and Keynes’s economics, and explains the economy as non-ergodic in these terms. Keynes’s policy activism is explained as a complexity view of economic policy that works like self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies. The paper closes with a discussion of the ontological foundations of uncertainty in Keynes’s thinking, and comments briefly on what a complexity-reflexivity framework implies regarding his thinking about time. |
| Keywords: | Keynes, complexity, reflexivity, non-ergodic, policy activism, uncertainty, time |
| JEL: | E12 B41 |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mrq:wpaper:2017-01&r=hpe |
| By: | Kanbur, Ravi |
| Abstract: | All those who know Ghana know about the association of Nobel Laureate W. Arthur Lewis with the country's economic policy making before independence and in its early years as a free nation. But there is less appreciation in development economics more generally of the central role that Ghana played in Lewis's thinking as a development economist, and there is less appreciation among Ghanaians of how the Ghana experience left an indelible mark on Lewis in the second half of his career. In this sixtieth year of Ghana's independence, this paper attempts to set out the deep connections between this giant of development economics and the evolution of Ghanaian Economic Policy. |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11720&r=hpe |
| By: | Klausinger, Hansjörg |
| Abstract: | The Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft (Austrian Economic Association, NOeG) provides a prominent example of the Viennese economic circles that more than academic economics dominated scientific discourse in the interwar years. For the first time this paper gives a thorough account of its history, from its foundation 1918 until the demise of its long-time president, Hans Mayer, 1955, based on official documents and archival material. The topics treated include its predecessor and rival, the Gesellschaft österreichischer Volkswirte, the foundation 1918 soon to be followed by years of inactivity, the relaunch by Mayer and Mises, the survival under the NS-regime and the expulsion of its Jewish members, and the slow restoration after 1945. In particular, an attempt is made to provide a list of the papers presented to the NOeG, as complete as possible, for the period 1918-1938. (author's abstract) |
| Keywords: | History of economic thought; Austrian school of economics; Vienna economic circles; University of Vienna |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus005:4515&r=hpe |
| By: | Klausinger, Hansjörg |
| Abstract: | This contribution examines the teaching of economics at the Hochschule für Welthandel as a case study in the evolution of Austrian academic economics in the 20th century. The period considered is divided into three periods - before, under and after the NS-regime. The main focus is on the multiparadigmatic character of the discipline before WWII, on economics under the NS rule, and on the restoration and delayed integration of economics into the international mainstream after 1945. On the personal level, the teaching of economics at the Welthandel was dominated for more than three decades by Walter Heinrich and Richard Kerschagl, whose influence is explored with regard to their academic, scientific and political activities. (author's abstract) |
| Keywords: | History of economic thought; Teaching of economics; Austrian economics; Hochschule für Welthandel (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business) |
| Date: | 2015–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus005:4627&r=hpe |
| By: | Magali Jaoul-Grammare (BETA, University of Strasbourg Strasbourg, France); Charlotte Le Chapelain (CLHDPP, BETA, University of Lyon 3) |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:afc:wpaper:01-17&r=hpe |
| By: | Flandreau, Marc |
| Abstract: | This paper is about the economics of financial power and regime change. It revisits important aspects of the'end of globalization' -“ as the shutting down of global capital markets after 1931 is generally referred to. It articulates a novel perspective on the fundamental regime change that occurred at that point by putting the collapse of foreign government bonds that occurred in New York in the early 1930s in the perspective of London's earlier experience as a centre of global capital exports. It argues that the London industrial set-up for managing foreign government debts had been essentially transplanted from London to New York in the 1920s. This set-up rested on the role of prestigious intermediaries who were involved in originating, distributing and monitoring high quality securities, as well as dealing with crises. It then argues that several critical aspects of the New Deal financial reforms adopted during the 1930s interfered directly with this set-up and prevented the industry from dealing with the crisis in the usual way. It concludes that the global bond market was a casualty of domestic policies associated with the New Deal, and that the New Deal opened a new era in international finance. |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11747&r=hpe |
| By: | Martin Shubik (Cowles Foundation, Yale University) |
| Abstract: | This essay is the third of three. The first is nontechnical and in part autobiograhpical describing the evolution of my approach to developing a microeconomic theory of money and.financial institutions. The second essay was devoted to a more formal sketch of a closed economic exchange system with no other externalities beyond money and markets. This essay builds on the existence of monetary exchange but also context, and active government with nonsymmetric information and many externaties indicate that the views of Keynes, Hayek and Schumpeter are all consistent with the next stages of complexity as the logic requires many different arrays of institutions to provide the necessary economic functions and adjust to the variety of socio-economic contexts. |
| Keywords: | Schumpeter, Keynes, aggregation, information, disequilibrium, minimal institutions, innovation, playable games |
| JEL: | C7 D50 E4 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2067&r=hpe |
| By: | Gong, Gang (Asian Development Bank Institute) |
| Abstract: | We suggest that the development process of a less-developed country can be divided into two stages, which demonstrate significantly different properties in areas such as structural endowments, production modes, income distribution, and the forces that drive economic growth. The two stages of economic development have been indicated in the growth theory of macroeconomics and in the various “turning point” theories in development economics, including Lewis’s dual economy theory, Kuznets curve, and the middle-income trap. A dynamic macroeconomic model is constructed to simulate the development process that reveals these two stages. Using the two-stage theory of economic development, we find that the People’s Republic of China’s economy is currently at the intersection between the first and second stages. This is the definition of “new normal” in the current Chinese economy. |
| Keywords: | two stages of economic development; dual economy theory; Kuznets curve; economic growth; new normal |
| JEL: | C61 C62 E10 O11 |
| Date: | 2016–12–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:adbiwp:0628&r=hpe |
| By: | Leonardo Bursztyn; Robert Jensen |
| Abstract: | Many people care about how they are perceived by those around them. A number of recent field experiments in economics have found that such social image concerns can have powerful effects on a range of behaviors. In this paper, we first review this recent literature aimed at identifying social image concerns or social pressure. We then highlight and discuss two important areas that have been comparatively less well-explored in this literature: understanding social pressure, including the underlying mechanisms, and whether such pressure can be shaped or influenced. |
| JEL: | D1 I31 Z13 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23013&r=hpe |
| By: | Gensbittel, Fabien; Lovo, Stefano; Renault, Jérôme; Tomala, Tristan |
| Abstract: | In a zero-sum asynchronous revision game, players can revise their actions only at exogenous random times. Players’ revision times follow Poisson processes, independent across players. Payoffs are obtained only at the deadline by implementing the last prepared actions in the ‘component game’. The value of this game is called revision value. We characterize it as the unique solution of an ordinary differential equation and show it is continuous in all parameters of the model. We show that, as the duration of the game increases, the limit revision value does not depend on the initial position and is included between the min-max and max-min of the component game. We fully characterize the equilibrium in 2?2 games. When the component game minmax and maxmin differ, the revision game equilibrium paths have a wait-and-wrestle structure: far form the deadline, players stay put at sur-place action profile, close to the deadline, they take best responses to the action of the opponent. |
| Keywords: | Revision Games, Zero-sum Games, Deadline Effect. |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:31319&r=hpe |
| By: | Kukushkin, Nikolai S. |
| Abstract: | Philip Reny's approach to games with discontinuous utility functions can work outside its original context. The existence of Nash equilibrium, as well as the possibility to approach an equilibrium with a finite individual improvement path, are established, under a condition slightly weaker than the better reply security, for three classes of strategic games: potential games, games with strategic complementarities, and aggregative games with appropriate monotonicity conditions. |
| Keywords: | better reply security; Nash equilibrium; potential game; game with strategic complementarities; aggregative game |
| JEL: | C72 |
| Date: | 2016–12–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:75862&r=hpe |
| By: | Jaelani, Aan |
| Abstract: | The relation between religion, economy, and country became the main topic of building a public welfare system. Human beings have the potential to realize the political level of moral conscience to make ends meet, but man as a creature of religion must have a balance between religious morality and economy morality. With economic ethics are supported by religious morality, the welfare system can be realized systemically if the state, communities, and individuals can realize the six-dimensional: the religion that is adhered to, good governance, justice, national security, the prosperity of society, and the vision of the nation. |
| Keywords: | Religion, economy, state, ethics, welfare state |
| JEL: | B31 I31 N35 P51 Z12 |
| Date: | 2016–07–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:76036&r=hpe |
| By: | Wei Ma (International Business School Suzhou, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China and Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, South Africa.) |
| Abstract: | We study general equilibrium theory of complete markets in an otherwise standard economy with each household having an additive perturbed utility function. Since this function represents a type of stochastic choice theory, the equilibrium of the corresponding economy is defined to be a price vector that makes its mean expected demand equal its mean endowment. We begin with a study of the economic meaning of this notion, by showing that at any given price vector, there always exists an economy with deterministic utilities whose mean demand is just the mean expected demand of our economy with additive perturbed utilities. We then show the existence of equilibrium, its Pareto inefficiency, and the upper hemi-continuity of the equilibrium set correspondence. Specializing to the case of regular economies, we finally demonstrate that almost every economy is regular and the equilibrium set correspondence in this regular case is continuous and locally constant. |
| Keywords: | General equilibrium, Stochastic choice, Regular economy |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pre:wpaper:201701&r=hpe |
| By: | Berger, Ulrich |
| Abstract: | Interpersonal trust is a one-sided social dilemma. Building on the binary trust game, we ask how trust and trustworthiness can evolve in a population where partners are matched randomly and agents sometimes act as trustors and sometimes as trustees. Trustors have the option to costly check a trustee's last action and to condition their behavior on the signal they receive. We show that the resulting population game admits two components of Nash equilibria. Nevertheless, the long-run outcome of an evolutionary social learning process modeled by the best response dynamics is unique. Even if unconditional distrust initially abounds, the trustors' checking option leads trustees to build a reputation for trustworthiness by honoring trust. This invites free-riders among the trustors who save the costs of checking and trust blindly, until it does no longer pay for trustees to behave in a trustworthy manner. This results in cyclical convergence to a mixed equilibrium with behavioral heterogeneity where suspicious checking and blind trusting coexist while unconditional distrust vanishes. (author's abstract) |
| Keywords: | trust game; evolutionary game theory; reputation; best response dynamics |
| Date: | 2016–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus005:4806&r=hpe |
| By: | Müller, Julia; Schwieren, Christiane; Spitzer, Florian |
| Abstract: | Many recent experimental studies have shown that some subjects destroy other subjects' incomes without receiving any material benefit, and that they even incur costs to do so. In this paper, we study the boundary conditions of this phenomenon, which is referred to as anti-social behavior. We introduce a four-player destruction game, in which we vary the framing and the presence of another activity, running in parallel to the destruction game. We observe a substantial amount of destruction in the baseline condition without the parallel activity, and with a framing in the spirit of previous destruction experiments. Our results indicate that a parallel activity as well as a framing emphasizing joint ownership of the item that can be destroyed reduces destruction almost to zero. We therefore argue that the emergence of anti-social behavior is highly contingent on the contextual environment. |
| Keywords: | anti-social behavior, joy of destruction, experiment, framing, boredom |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus005:5343&r=hpe |
| By: | Krishna Khatri |
| Abstract: | In this paper the Shapley value of digraph (directed graph) games are considered. Digraph games are transferable utility (TU) games with limited cooperation among players, where players are represented by nodes. A restrictive relation between two adjacent players is established by a directed line segment. Directed line segments, connecting the initial player with the terminal player, form the coalition among players. Dominance relation is established between players and this relation determines whether or not a player wants to cooperate. To cooperate, we assume player joins coalition where he/she is not dominated by any other players. The Shapley value is defines as the average of marginal contribution vectors corresponding to all permutations that do not violate the subordination of players. The Shapley value for various digraph games is calculated and analyzed. For a given characteristic function, a quick way to calculated Shapley values is formulated. |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1701.01677&r=hpe |
| By: | Berger, Ulrich; De Silva, Hannelore; Fellner-Röhling, Gerlinde |
| Abstract: | Experimental tests of choice predictions in one-shot games show only little support for Nash equilibrium (NE). Poisson Cognitive Hierarchy (PCH) and level-k (LK) are behavioral models of the thinking-steps variety where subjects differ in the number of levels of iterated reasoning they perform. Camerer et al. (2004) claim that substituting the Poisson parameter tau = 1.5 yields a parameter-free PCH model (pfPCH) which predicts experimental data considerably better than NE. We design a new multi-person game, the Minimizer Game, as a testbed to compare initial choice predictions of NE, pfPCH and LK. Data obtained from two large-scale online experiments strongly reject NE and LK, but are well in line with the point prediction of pfPCH. (authors' abstract) |
| Keywords: | behavioral game theory; experimental games; Poisson cognitive hierarchy; level-k model; minimizer game |
| Date: | 2016–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus005:4805&r=hpe |
| By: | Camerer, Colin; Dreber, Anna; Forsell, Eskil; Ho, Teck-Hua; Huber, Jurgen; Johannesson, Magnus; Kirchler, Michael; Almenberg, Johan; Altmejd, Adam; Chan, Taizan; Heikensten, Emma; Holzmeister, Felix; Imai, Taisuke; Isaksson, Siri; Nave, Gideon; Pfeiffer, Thomas; Razen, Michael; Wu, Hang |
| Abstract: | The reproducibility of scientific findings has been called into question. To contribute data about reproducibility in economics, we replicate 18 studies published in the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2011-2014. All replications follow predefined analysis plans publicly posted prior to the replications, and have a statistical power of at least 90% to detect the original effect size at the 5% significance level. We find a significant effect in the same direction as the original study for 11 replications (61%); on average the replicated effect size is 66% of the original. The reproducibility rate varies between 67% and 78% for four additional reproducibility indicators, including a prediction market measure of peer beliefs. |
| Keywords: | replication, economics, experiment |
| JEL: | A12 B41 C9 |
| Date: | 2016–03–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:75461&r=hpe |
| By: | Michel De Vroey (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)) |
| Abstract: | This paper is an assessment of Claveau and Gingras’s paper, “Macrodynamics of Economics: A Bibliometric History”. Its contention is that for all its innovative character, bibliometric history cannot replace inside-knowledge history. To make my point, I examine the particular case of the history of macroeconomics by confronting what their paper can say about this history with what an inside-knowledge approach has to offer. |
| Date: | 2016–12–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2016033&r=hpe |
| By: | Hollanders, David (Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management); Onderstal, S. |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiutis:b494562d-68fc-43e9-a02a-583112ae903c&r=hpe |
| By: | Bovenberg, Lans (Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management) |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiutis:2db38a29-a6a2-49f4-bf56-1bcd5ebcafea&r=hpe |
| By: | Bovenberg, Lans (Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management) |
| Abstract: | Het voorliggende artikel is de rede die door mij is uitgesproken bij de openbare aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar F.J.D. Goldschmeding leerstoel ‘Vernieuwing van Economieonderwijs’ aan Tilburg University op donderdag 15 december 2016. |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiutis:662518a4-3679-417f-a41e-1c4dbf5362d0&r=hpe |