This paper is the Schwartz Memorial Lecture, delivered at Kellogg, Northwestern University in May 1998. The lecture introduces some ideas about the possible use of tools taken from the economics literature to explain language phenomena. Two specific issues are discussed: From the domain of...

We asked subjects to self-select into one of two constests, "coin" or "die." The winner in each of the contest is the person with most correct guesses of 20 coin flips or 20 rolls of a die, respectively. Most subjects reported that they belived that most people would go to the "coin" group. They...

The paper questions the methodology of "economics and psychology". It focuses on the case of hyperbolic discounting. Using some experimental results, I argue that the same sort of evidence which rejects the standard constant discount utility functions can just as easily reject hyperbolic...