Uskali Mäki has long argued that realist interpretations of economics do not face a challenge regarding the ontological status of non-observable theoretical entities. He argues that in economics, unlike physics, the theoretical entities are "commonsensibles" – entities familiar from our...

The main point of this paper is to contribute to understanding Milton Friedman’s (1953) “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (hereafter F1953), one of the most influential statements of economic methodology of the twentieth century, and, in doing so, help discern the non trivial but...

The present financial and economic crisis has revealed a systemic failure of academic economics and emphasized the need to re-think how to model economic phenomena. Lawson (2009) seems concerned that critics of standard models now will fill academic journals with contributions that make the same...

Replication studies are considered a hallmark of good scientific practice. Yet they are treated among researchers as an ideal to be professed but not practiced. To provide incentives and favorable boundary conditions for replication practice, the main stakeholders need to be aware of what drives...

This paper is an introduction to an edited volume entitled, 'Transforming Economics: Perspectives on the Critical Realist Project.' It outlines the project of critical realism in economics, describing how the latter's emphasis on social ontology shapes its approach to economic methodology and...

This article presents a review on the economics literature on co-operatives from the point of view of economic methodology. I compare two different approaches, the neoclassical approach and the new institutional approach. The former approach is exemplified by Jaroslav Vanek's (1970) The General...

When it comes to finding whether a firm has violated antitrust law, economists are often called upon as expert witnesses by the parties involved in litigation. This paper focuses on a challenge that economists may face when appearing as expert witnesses in US federal courts, namely to comply...

Models of ethical voting, in which individuals derive intrinsic utility from “doing their part” by voting in elections, have been proposed as an explanation for the “voting paradox” (why people vote if the probability of being pivotal is negligible). I show that the set of equilibria of...

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists' engagements with other disciplines — e.g. mathematics, statistics,...

Behavioral economics emerged in the second half of the 20th century and has become an important social science research area. Some have argued that the emergence of behavioral economics (BE) amounts to a scientific revolution. That is, they argue that BE is becoming or has become the new,...