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on History and Philosophy of Economics |
| By: | Chang, Kuo-Ping |
| Abstract: | Behavioral economics, notably developed by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, has found consistent and pervasive anomalies in common people’s daily behaviors. This paper has employed the concepts in traditional economics (e.g., choice, relative price, and opportunity cost) to analyze the anomalies found in behavioral economics. The results show that quite a few anomalies, such as preference reversal, isolation effect and sunk cost fallacy, do not exist. This is not to say that people always make rational choices. The findings of the paper conclude, however, that common people may not be as irrational as behavioral economists have suggested (in some situations, common people may act more like a rational economist). |
| Keywords: | Choice, sunk cost fallacy, relative price ratio (rate of return), prospect theory, endowment effect. |
| JEL: | D11 D9 |
| Date: | 2019–01–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:96561&r=all |
| By: | Stephan Schulmeister |
| Abstract: | John Maynard Keynes war ein Ökonom, der stets zwischen der Welt der Theorien und der Realität pendelte, er prüfte und verwarf theoretische Annahmen aufgrund seiner Beobachtungen, die er wiederum als Ausgangspunkte für die Entwicklung neuer Theorien nutzte. Gleichzeitig betrieb er als Praktiker keine andere Art von Aktivitäten mit solcher Intensität und Kontinuität wie Finanzgeschäfte aller Art. Diese Erfahrungen machten für Keynes klar, dass ökonomisches Verhalten essentiell durch Unsicherheit, Emotionen und soziale Interaktion geprägt wird. In seiner Darstellung der Handels- und Preisdynamik auf Finanzmärkten (sie nimmt die wichtigsten Entwicklungen seit den 1970er-Jahren vorweg) entwirft er ein zum "homo oeconomicus" in radikalem Gegensatz stehendes Menschenbild. Allerdings hat er diese realitätsnahe Mikro-Fundierung seiner Makroökonomie nicht theoretisch ausformuliert, denn dann hätte er das gesamte Theoriegebäude der Neoklassik explizit verwerfen müssen. Dies aber hätte dem Hauptziel seiner "General Theory" widersprochen, seine "fellow economists" mit seiner Beschäftigungs-, Zins- und Geldtheorie dort abzuholen, wo sie sich befanden. |
| Date: | 2019–10–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wfo:wpaper:y:2019:i:588&r=all |
| By: | Timothy Shields (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University; Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University); Eric Schniter (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University; Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University); Daniel Sznycer (Department of Psychology, University of Montreal) |
| Abstract: | Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a looming concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based investments and emotions from across three nearly identical economic games: human-human trust games, human-robot trust games, and human-robot trust games where the robot decision impacts another human. Robots in our experiment mimic humans: they are programmed to make reciprocity decisions based on previously observed behaviors by humans in analogous situations. We find that people invest similarly in humans and robots. By contrast, the social emotions elicited by the interactions (but not non-social emotions) differed across human and robot trust games, and did so lawfully. Emotional reactions depended on how one’s trust game decision interacted with the partnered agent’s decision, and whether another person was affected economically and emotionally. |
| Keywords: | Trust; Robots; Artificial Intellgience; Emotion; Experiment |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:18-22&r=all |
| By: | Louis-Gaëtan Giraudet (CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement - CIRAD - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech); Antoine Missemer (CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement - CIRAD - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | Energy efficiency can be considered as a central pillar of global warming mitigation, with important co-benefits, including productivity gains, resource conservation or national security. It is also a subject of controversy between engineers and economists, who have divergent conceptions of the notion of optimality that delineates energy efficiency potentials. Modern surveys hardly go back beyond the 1970s and do not fully explore the reasons and conditions for the persistent differences between economists' and engineers' views. This paper provides such a historical account, investigating the positioning of economic analysis in contrast to the technical expertise on key energy efficiency topics – the rebound effect, the energy efficiency gap, and green nudges, from the 19th century to the present day. It highlights the permanence and evolution in the relationship that economists have had with technical expertise. An extension of the current conceptual framework is finally provided to connect our historical findings with avenues for future research. |
| Keywords: | engineering,nudge,history of economic thought,energy efficiency,market barriers and failures |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:ciredw:halshs-02301636&r=all |
| By: | Jacques Fontanel (CESICE - Centre d'études sur la sécurité internationale et les coopérations européennes - UPMF - Université Pierre Mendès France - Grenoble 2 - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes) |
| Abstract: | Résumé : Les études philosophiques et religieuses ont dominé l'analyse économique jusqu'à l'essor de la réflexion mercantiliste. Celle-ci n'est pas une théorie unifiée, mais elle présente quelques caractéristiques communes comme la recherche de la puissance du Prince, le poids accordé aux métaux précieux pour définir la richesse d'un pays et la banalisation de la guerre comme processus de prédation et de la guerre économique. Les différences concernent la thésaurisation des métaux précieux, l'importance du secteur secondaire et du commerce. Plusieurs philosophes ont contesté ces analyses notamment Grotius, Hume, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau ou Montesquieu. L'analyse mercantiliste va être condamnée par Adam Smith en 1776, avec la publication de son célèbre ouvrage sur la « Richesse des Nations ». La guerre est une réalité ancienne, déjà conceptualisée par les philosophes grecs. Deux postulats philosophiques s'affrontent concernant les causes des guerres. Pour le déterminisme, si l'univers est mû par la guerre, les hommes ne sont que des pions qu'une volonté aveugle fait obéir. Dans ce contexte, l'homme n'est pas vraiment responsable et il est un acteur involontaire et irresponsable de la guerre. Au contraire, les philosophes de la liberté insistent sur le fait que la guerre est le produit d'un choix et d'une responsabilité des humains. Elle été progressivement justifiée comme une décision exceptionnelle des autorités politiques et religieuses, lourde de conséquences, qui proclament que le |
| Keywords: | Mercantilisme,Métaux précieux,manufactures,commerce,Actes de navigation,analyses économiques et politiques de Aristote,Platon,Colbert,Grotius,Hume,Hobbes,Spinoza,Locke,Rousseau ou Montesquieu |
| Date: | 2019–09–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02314440&r=all |
| By: | M.J. Boumans |
| Abstract: | This survey is written to show historians of economics what is happening in history of econometrics, and is the second survey I did with this aim. The first survey, published in 2011, concluded that interest in the history of econometrics has arisen primarily from within econometrics itself and that its histories have been written mainly by econometricians. After the publication of the first survey, history of econometrics remained mainly the interest of econometricians. More recently, however, one can observe an increasing interest in the history of econometrics among historians of economics and historians of science. It seems that if the subject of study is econometrics as a discipline it remains to be of interest only to the econometricians, but if the subject is the artefacts created by econometricians, such as econometric models, it caught the attention of historians of science. |
| Keywords: | history of econometrics, metaphors, scientific revolution, discipline, crediting, science practice |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:use:tkiwps:1810&r=all |
| By: | Aïleen Lotz (Cerca Trova) |
| Abstract: | This paper extends the notion of the rational agent in economics by acknowledging the role of the unconscious in the agent's decision-making process. It argues that the unconscious can be modelled by a rational agent with his own objective function and set of information. The combination of both the conscious and unconscious agents is called the dual agent. This dual agent presents rationally biased behaviors that may persist through aggregation and could be potentially measured. It also provides a theoretical approach to the emotionally-driven actions. |
| Keywords: | dual agent,conscious and unconscious,rationality,multi-rationality,emotions,choices and preferences,multi-agent model,consistency |
| Date: | 2019–10–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02314663&r=all |
| By: | Anwar Shaikh (Department of Economics, New School for Social Research) |
| Abstract: | Modern authors have identified a variety of striking economic patterns, most importantly those involving the distribution of incomes and profit rates. In recent times, the econophysics literature has demonstrated that bottom incomes follow an exponential distribution, top incomes follow a Pareto, profit rates display a tent-shaped distribution. This paper is concerned with the theory underlying various explanations of these phenomena. Traditional econophysics relies on energy-conserving “particle collision” models in which simulation is often used to derive a stationary distribution. Those in the Jaynesian tradition rely on entropy maximization, subject to certain constraints, to infer the final distribution. This paper argues that economic phenomena should be derived as results of explicit economic processes. For instance, the entry and exit process motivated by supply decisions of firms underlies the drift-diffusion form of wage, interest and profit rates arbitrage. These processes give rise to stationary distributions that turn out to be also entropy maximizing. In arbitrage approach, entropy maximization is a result. In the Jaynesian approaches, entropy maximization is the means. |
| Keywords: | Economics, arbitrage, econophysics, income distribution, profit distribution, statistical mechanics, Jaynes |
| Date: | 2019–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:new:wpaper:1913&r=all |
| By: | Linda Dezsö; George Loewenstein |
| Abstract: | The existence of an asymmetric history between bargaining partners can trigger self-serving beliefs about the fair settlement of a subsequent dispute, ultimately leading to bargaining impasse. In a two-stage bargaining experiment, we demonstrate that dyads who share a history that produced wealth asymmetries between them are less likely to settle in a subsequent negotiation than when the same wealth asymmetry stems from partners’ independent histories. When partners share an asymmetric history, the individual who previously lost out in the first stage believes that s/he deserves compensation in the second-stage, but the individual who prevailed in the first stage believes that compensation is not called for. These divergent, self-serving, views about a fair settlement – and the resulting irreconcilable demands – lead to bargaining impasse. We find, further, that unbiased spectators side with the losers in the first stage; they believe that it is fair for them to be compensated in the second stage. Indeed, this is true albeit to a lesser extent, even if the winner and loser had not directly interacted with one-another – i.e., if the history is not shared. |
| JEL: | C78 D91 |
| Date: | 2019–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vie:viennp:1906&r=all |