The results of standard lab experiments have long been questioned because of the convenience samples of subjects they typically employ and the abstract nature of the lab settings. These two characteristics of experimental economics, it is argued, are the key factors that endanger the external...

Background: Infertility affects one in eight couples worldwide. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is now considered a mainstream fertility treatment to increase the chance of conceiving a child in infertile individuals. The main cause of infertility is advanced female age due to the number and...

We explore experimentally a cognitive-effort channel through which defaults might influence behavior in an environment where the choice architect has misaligned incentives. Our experimental setting is an insurance market where the firm is better informed about the aggregate statistical risk...

Adam Smith’s view of the proper role for government in commercial societies remains a source of debate. Here we sketch out in simple game-theoretic terms the numerous public-goods provision and externalities problems on display in particular in Book V of The Wealth of Nations. Casting these...

Conceptual lenses, or models (Allison 1969; Ortmann 2008), draw on stable ways of thinking about the world, or “reasoning routines”. We explore the deep structure of Adam Smith’s work, and to what extent it is the result of a set of “reasoning routines” that, at an early stage of his...

Introduction -- Chapter 1: Schumpeter’s Assessment of Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations: Why He Got It Wrong -- Chapter 2: Adam Smith's Rhetorical Strategy in The Wealth of Nations, against the Commercial System of Great Britain -- Chapter 3: The Nature and Causes of Corporate Negligence,...

Over the past decades psychological theories have made significant headway into economics, culminating in the 2002 (partially) and 2017 Nobel prizes awarded for work in the field of Behavioural Economics. Many of the insights imported from psychology into economics share a common trait: the...