While leading figures in the early history of economics conceived of it as inseparable from philosophy and other humanities, there has been movement, especially in recent decades, towards its becoming an essentially technical field with narrowly specialized areas of inquiry. Certainly,...

We propose a formal model of scientific modeling, geared to applications of decision theory and game theory. The model highlights the freedom that modelers have in conceptualizing social phenomena using general paradigms in these fields. It may shed some light on the distinctions between (i)...

Recently Cherchye et al. (2011) reformulated the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities, introduced by Brown and Matzkin (1996), as an integer programming problem and proved that solving the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities is NP-hard. Brown and Shannon (2002) derived an equivalent system of...

Recently Cherchye et al. (2011) reformulated the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities, introduced by Brown and Matzkin (1996), as an integer programming problem and proved that solving the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities is NP-hard. Brown and Shannon (2002) derived an equivalent system of...

Behavioral economics has played a fundamental role historically in innovation in economic institutions, even long before behavioral economics was recognized as a discipline. Examples from history, notably that of the invention of workers’ compensation, illustrate this point. Though scholarly...

The Cowles Commission approach is reviewed and compared to the approaches of real business cycle (RBC) theorists and new Keynesian economists. It is argued that RBC models are not tested in a serious enough way and that the new Keynesian literature is not empirical enough for testing even to be...

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects — capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin...