Abstract. In institutional studies various concepts and terms have been proposed to describe institutional phenomena and their nature. They include behavioral regularity, habituation, collective intentionality, common knowledge, shared beliefs, artifacts, rules of the game, system of signs, and...

This is a contribution to the Journal Symposium on Douglass North's book on Understanding the Process of Economic Change by Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. It tries to understand his dynamic theory as that of the belief-institution co-evolution process and applies contributions of...

Powers of recursion are often adduced for ‘recombinant innovation'. The onset of the digital economy, based on operations on discretely encoded information, has renewed interest in this. Digital computing has a provenance with the John von Neumann dynamical systems theory based on complex...

Contemporary works, such as Lusk & Hudson's (2004), find that the greater knowledge regarding the possible results of the ultimatum game lead to results closer to the subgame perfect equilibrium. In this paper we seek to further this line of research beyond the fact of making the individuals...

We discuss possible criteria that may qualify or disqualify power indices for applications. Instead of providing final answers we merely ask questions that are relevant from our point of view and summarize some material from the literature

Game and decision theory start from rather strong premises. Preferences, represented by utilities, beliefs represented by probabilities, common knowledge and symmetric rationality as background assumptions are treated as “given.” A richer language enabling us to capture the process leading...

This paper investigates two different approaches to the analysis of institutions using game theory and discusses their methodological and theoretical implications for further research. Starting from von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory, we investigate, how Schotter and Schelling's approaches to...

If we take it that, at least in the social sciences, "realistic" implies "finite", then countless economic models involving infinitary assumptions must obviously be classified as unrealistic - for example, models with infinitely divisible goods, a continuum of traders, consumers optimizing over...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

This paper argues that the acceptance of two recent methodological advances in economics, namely game theory and laboratory experimentation, was affected by the history dependence constraining the formalization of economics. After an early period in which the two methods were coolly received by...