There is an ambiguity in Amartya Sen's capability approach as to what constitutes an in-dividual's resources, conversion factors and valuable functionings. What we here call the\circularity problem" points to the fact that all three concepts seem to be mutually en-dogenous and interrelated. All...

The quadratic scoring rule (QSR) is often used to guarantee an incentive compatibleelicitation of subjective probabilities over events. Experimentalists haveregularly not been able to ensure that subjects fully comprehend the consequencesof their actions on payoffs given the rules of the games....

In two-person generosity games the proposer's agreement payoffis exogenously given whereas that of the responder is endogenouslydetermined by the proposer's choice of the pie size. Earlier resultsfor two-person generosity games show that participants seem to caremore for eciency than for equity....

Agents interacting on a body of water choose between technologiesto catch …sh. One is harmless to the resource, as it allows full recovery;the other yields high immediate catches, but low(er) future catches.Strategic interaction in one ‘objective’resource game may induceseveral ‘subjective’...

Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important do-mains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlyingstructure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, wor-ries, marital status and...

Epistemic arguments play a significant role in Hayek’s defense of market liberalism. Hisclaim that market competition is a discovery procedure that serves the common good is acase in point. The hypothesis of the markets’ efficient use of existing knowledge issupplemented by the idea that...

While there is little doubt that innovations drive economic growth, their effects on well-being areless clear. One reason for this are ambivalent effects of innovations on well-being that result frompecuniary and technological externalities of innovations, argued to be inevitable. Another...

Strong growth in disposable income has driven, and is still driving, consumption to unprecedented,but not sustainable levels. To explain the dynamic interplay of needs, need satisfaction, andinnovation underlying that growth a behavioral theory of consumption is suggested and discussedwith...

The paper discusses recent trends in the sister sciences of evolutionary economics andcomplexity economics. It suggests that a unifying approach that marries the two strands isneeded when reconstructing economics as a science capable of tackling the two key questions ofthe discipline: complex...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...