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on History and Philosophy of Economics |
| By: | Allisson, François; Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Cléo |
| Abstract: | Maurice Dobb’s Wages, a short textbook-style work commissioned by John Maynard Keynes for the Cambridge Economic Handbooks series, was first published in 1928. It went through six revised editions by 1959, along with numerous reprints and translations up to the 1980s. This paper analyses the evolution of the book’s content in order to question the status of economic theory in relation to the study of labour issues. The first section examines the making of the handbook and shows how Wages addressed the usefulness of economic theory, particularly price theory. The second section traces the evolution of Dobb’s views on wages, shaped by his controversy with John Hicks in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The third section explores the growing scepticism of Wages across its subsequent editions and translations, following its trajectory from the centre to the periphery of economics. |
| Keywords: | Dobb (Maurice); textbook; wages; labour economics; wage theory |
| JEL: | B13 B24 J30 |
| Date: | 2026–05–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138374 |
| By: | François Fulconis (AU - Avignon Université, •JPEG - Laboratoire des sciences Juridiques, Politique, Economiques et de Gestion - AU - Avignon Université, CRET-LOG - Centre de Recherche sur le Transport et la Logistique - AMU - Aix Marseille Université, AMU - Aix Marseille Université); Gilles A Paché (CERGAM - Centre d'Études et de Recherche en Gestion d'Aix-Marseille - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - UTLN - Université de Toulon); François Grünewald (Groupe URD (Urgence Réhabilitation Développement)) |
| Abstract: | Climatic change is not merely a natural disaster but a crisis of collective judgment, exposing the challenges that governance and educational systems face in navigating uncertainty. Constrained by outdated predictive models and indicators derived from a historically stable world, educators often prioritize analytical calculation over the capacity to perceive connections, anticipate complexity, and imagine possibilities. Consequently, approaching action as a balance between analytical rigor and creative intuition becomes essential. French Institutes of Technology (IUTs, "U" for University) exemplify this approach: their strong local engagement and close ties with professional sectors support a pedagogy grounded in real-world challenges, where decision-making confronts uncertainty and complexity. Through a rigorous integration of theory and practice, IUTs cultivate undergraduate students capable of exercising discernment in unstable environments, avoiding the creation of "hemiplegic" decision-makers confined to a single mode of thought. This perspective highlights that hybridization of knowledge and practical skills offers a powerful means of responding to the intellectual, social, and political disorientation revealed by contemporary climate crises. |
| Keywords: | Decision-making, France, Institutes of Technology (IUTs), Pedagogical innovation, Uncertainty, Undergraduate students, Climatic change |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05610595 |
| By: | Chaim Fershtman (Tel Aviv University); Uzi Segal (Boston College) |
| Abstract: | We analyze societies where people express their opinions with respect to a single issue. These opinions also affect social connections. People enjoy being connected to others, but only with those whose opinions they deem acceptable. In such environments people behave strategically to optimize their social connections and therefore their expressed opinions do not necessarily represent their true ones. Dis- tributions of expressed opinions thus depend on the social structure. Changes in the views of some people or changes in the relative size of different groups may trigger changes in the map of social connections and in the distribution of expressed opinions. |
| Keywords: | Strategic opinion expression, social connections |
| JEL: | Z13 D85 |
| Date: | 2026–05–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:bocoec:1111 |
| By: | Ian Gemp; Crystal Qian; Marc Lanctot; Kate Larson |
| Abstract: | Nash equilibrium serves as a fundamental mathematical tool in economics and game theory. However, it classically assumes knowledge of player utilities, whereas economics generally regards preferences as more fundamental. To leverage equilibrium analysis in strategic scenarios, one must first elicit numerical utilities consistent with player preferences, a delicate and time-consuming process. In this work, we forgo precise utilities and generalize the Nash equilibrium to a setting where we only assume a player is capable of providing an ordinal ranking of their actions within the context of other players' joint actions. The key technical challenge is to rethink the definition of a best-response. While the classical definition identifies actions maximizing expected payoff, we naturally look towards social choice theory for how to aggregate preferences to identify the most preferred actions. We define this generalized notion of a context-ordinal Nash equilibrium, establish its existence under mild conditions on aggregation methods, introduce notions of regularization, approximation, and regret, explore complexity for simple settings, and develop learning rules for computing such equilibria. In doing so, we provide a generalization of Nash equilibrium and demonstrate its direct applicability to elicited preferences in human experiments. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.07996 |