Conceptual Displacement: From the Natural to the Social

This paper distinguishes between epistemological naturalism, which it supports, and ontological naturalism, which it opposes. It sketches the emergence of anti-naturalist social theory among nineteenth-century African-American intellectuals and its refinement by twentieth-century feminists. These movements challenged ontological naturalism in the social sciences by substituting social constructionist concepts of race and gender for naturalist ones. Economics awaits a similar liberation. The paper identifies four naturalist concepts—atomism, determinism and biologically determined race and gender differences—as structuring mainstream economic theory. It concludes that ontological naturalism is inconsistent with the application of the epistemology of the natural sciences to the social sciences.     

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Darwin uses natural selection in two different senses. Struggle for existence refers to rivalry; survival of the fittest refers to surviving environmental changes. The mainstream vision of economic harmony requires casting natural selection as survival of the fittest. There is no struggle, no conflict. Mainstream economics depicts the selector in the evolutionary game as the firm itself. The mainstream vision requires banishing corporate power and the technological basis of power. For Veblen, corporate power is central. The existence of power implies that among firms, selection assumes the form of struggle. Evolutionary game theory breaks with the mainstream vision; firms are rivals. Evolutionary game theory, however, lacks the "stories" that provide a mapping between theory and reality, something institutionalists are well-positioned to provide. Stories are necessary for understanding corporate power, its origins, its use, and its limitations.     

Bounded Rationality in Economics: A Game Theorist's View

In this paper, we argue that it is essential to incorporate bounded rationality into game theory. Game theory has been applied to aspects of economics such as industrial organizati on on the basis of the naive interpret ation of game theory, which requires players to be ideally rational in an extremely unrealistic way. We stress the importance of establishing the perceptive interpretation of game theory by taking boundedly rational players' inductive reasoning processes into account. We explain my recent work, Matsushima (1997), which shows that the subjective games perceived by players in the long run are entirely different from the true objective game, and are trivial games in the sense that there exists a strictly dominant and subjectively Pareto-efficient strategy profile among the set of pure strategy profiles.
JEL Classification Numbers: C70, C90, D43, D80     

Elements of Publicness in Urban Transit

This paper examines the claim that Veblen's theory of cultural evolution has generalized Darwinian principles to socioeconomic phenomena. Our argument takes place in the debate around "generalized Darwinism" in evolutionary and institutional economics. We claim that Veblen frequently relied on the concept of selection and considered institutions both as units and as factors of selection. We also argue that some of Veblen's insights can be clarified by expressing them in evolutionary-game theoretic terms. Thus, we suggest a close connection between the ontological framework of generalized Darwinism and the technical study of evolutionary phenomena through evolutionary game theory.     

Team reasoning theory: an experimental analysis of common reason to believe and social distance

The aim of this paper is to study the role of the “common reason to believe” (Sugden in Philos Explor 16:165–181, 2003) and the reduction of social distance within the theory of team reasoning. The analysis draws on data collected through a Traveler’s Dilemma experiment. To study the role of the common reason to believe, players’ beliefs in their counterparts’ choices are elicited, and the correlation between the endorsement of team reasoning and beliefs is considered. The relation between social distance and team reasoning is analyzed by introducing a meeting between the two players after the game. We show that the common reason to believe appropriately explains the internal logic of team reasoning and that a reduction of social distance does not produce any statistically significant effect on the probability that team reasoning will be used.     

Is ‘new’ behavioral economics ‘mainstream’?

When comparing ‘new’ and ‘old’ behavioral economics (BE), many argue that ‘new’ BE has close ties with what is often called ‘mainstream’ economics. The aim of this paper is to reframe the ‘old’ vs. ‘new’ BE debate and investigate the nature of the relationship between psychologists, behavioral economists, and ‘mainstream’ economists. This will lead us to develop the concept of ‘space of interaction’, building on Galison’s metaphor of ‘trading zones’, to emphasize the role of outsiders, strategic thinking, and negotiation in ‘new’ BE. By discussing some often implicit arguments in an otherwise disconnected literature, we seek to bring new arguments to the discussions through a careful study of those relationships in the history of ‘new’ BE and its more recent developments. Leaving aside the orthodox/heterodox contrast and comparative approaches, we hope to provide a different account of the changes in ‘new’ BE and its relationship with the ‘mainstream’.     

团队道德风险的再研究

本文着重考察两人管理团队中搭便车的古典问题。与纯道德风险问题不同,我们设想企业中的个人能力也会影响团队的产出。应用一个两期模型,我们表明在一个阿尔钦—德莫塞茨型企业中,即使进行有限期博弈,每个成员的努力水平也会比传统理论预测的高。我们认为这是由于团队成员间的相互可观测性引起的。因此我们可认为,管理团队中的自我激励机制的存在缓解了搭便车现象,这也可能是团队组织存在的原因。     

The place of Austrian economics in contemporary entrepreneurship research

We review the place of Austrian economics in contemporary entrepreneurship and management research, focusing on the contributions of Israel Kirzner. We show that Kirzner’s central concept of entrepreneurial discovery has been vastly influential in theoretical and applied work on entrepreneurship, even though Kirzner’s larger research program has not been well understood. We also describe and assess a number of methodological, ontological, and cognitive critiques of the opportunity-discovery approach and review the most important alternatives, including the judgment-based view associated with Knight (1921) and more recent contributors. We conclude that the entrepreneurship and management literatures provide a useful example of how Austrian economics—Kirznerian economics in particular—can play an important role in shaping mainstream discussions, debates, and research programs in the social sciences.     

Further Reflections on Critical Realism

Abstract

We deal with the main points of Fleetwood's response to our earlier paper and argue that our main contentions remain intact. Critical Realism (CR) remains epistemologically weak; its claims for the usefulness of explanatory power are unconvincing; and, in particular, it provides little help in assessing rival theories. Furthermore, its appreciation of alternative theoretical accounts is underdeveloped because of the tendency to use broad ontological claims to delineate a preferred type of theory. Finally, we argue that the further elaboration of CR by Fleetwood serves to illuminate rather than ameliorate its shortcomings.     

The minority game unpacked:

We conduct an experiment on a minority-of-three game in which each player is a team composed of three subjects. Each team can freely discuss its strategies in the game and decisions must be made via majority rule. Team discussions are recorded and their content analyzed to detect evidence of strategy co-evolution among teams playing together. Our main results show no evidence supporting the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium solution, and provide evidence more consistent with reinforcement learning models than with belief-based models. Exhibiting level-2 rationality (i.e., reasoning about others’ beliefs) is positively and significantly correlated with higher than average earnings in the game. In addition, teams that are more successful tend to become more self-centered over time, paying more attention to their own past successes than to the behavior of other teams. Finally, we find evidence of mutual adaptation over time, as teams that are more strategic induce competing teams to be more self-centered instead. Our results contribute to the understanding of coordination dynamics resting on heterogeneity and co-evolution of decision rules. In addition, they provide support at the decision process level to the validity of modeling behavior using reinforcement learning models.     

Analogies and theories: The role of simplicity and the emergence of norms

We consider the dynamics of reasoning by general rules (theories) and by specific cases (analogies). When an agent faces an exogenous process, we show that, under mild conditions, if reality happens to be simple, the agent will converge to adopt a theory and discard analogical thinking. If, however, reality is complex, analogical reasoning is unlikely to disappear. By contrast, when the agent is a player in a large population coordination game, and the process is generated by all playersʼ predictions, convergence to a theory is much more likely. This may explain how a large population of players selects an equilibrium in such a game, and how social norms emerge. Mixed cases, involving noisy endogenous processes are likely to give rise to complex dynamics of reasoning, switching between theories and analogies.     

Post Keynesianism,Heterodoxy and Mainstream Economics

After briefly presenting the concepts of orthodox, mainstream and heterodox economics, and applying them to the contemporary period, this article discusses the Post Keynesian school and its relation to contemporary orthodox and mainstream economics. While opposed to the neoclassical orthodoxy, the Post Keynesian school has some positive unifying ideas, although some internal tensions remain. There are also some overlaps between Post Keynesianism and other approaches, and a careful combination of contributions from different approaches and different disciplines is not only possible, but also necessary. Post Keynesianism is located outside current mainstream economics, although this argument partly depends on a more precise specification of the concept of uncertainty. The non-mainstream character of Post Keynesian economics has at least two types of important implications. The first involves the approach's ability to influence the economy and the danger of ‘the scholastic fallacy’; the second refers to a reproductive difficulty inside academia.     

Inductive reasoning about unawareness

We develop a model of games with awareness that allows for differential levels of awareness. We show that, for the standard modal-logical interpretations of belief and awareness, a player cannot believe there exist propositions of which he is unaware. Nevertheless, we argue that a boundedly rational individual may regard the possibility that there exist propositions of which she is unaware as being supported by inductive reasoning, based on past experience and consideration of the limited awareness of others. In this paper, we provide a formal representation of inductive reasoning in the context of a dynamic game with differential awareness. We show that, given differential awareness over time and between players, individuals can derive inductive support for propositions expressing their own unawareness. We consider the ecological rationality of heuristics to guide decisions in problems involving differential awareness.     

博弈论对正统经济学思维方式的冲击

自20世纪40年代博弈论被引入经济学之后,现代经济学在许多领域发生了很大的变化。与此同时,作为工具的博弈论与作为思想的博弈论却出现了一种分离的倾向。在作为工具的博弈论满足经济学家对形式主义模型沉溺的同时,作为思想的博弈论却对正统经济学形成了根基性的挑战。博弈论不仅是一种数学工具,更是一种方法论。它引导着人们彻底重新认识经济世界和人们的经济行为,在这一过程中,正统经济学的思维方式——确定性的经济社会观、理性经济人假设、个体主义原则受到了愈来愈强的冲击。     

Is neo-Walrasian macroeconom(etr)ics a dead end? An assessment of recent criticisms of DSGE models

After the 2008 “new Great Crisis,” it is widely recognized that mainstream macroeconom(etr)ics—the last result of Lucas’s anti-Keynesian revolution of the 1980s, which tried to give macroeconomics sound neo‐Walrasian microeconomic bases —has failed to anticipate and then appraise the crisis. Has this crisis revealed a failure of this macroeconom(etr)ics as a scientific theory? Mainstream macroeconomists defend their models on the basis of their alleged superiority in terms of clarity and coherence. The thesis of this article is that this claim about superiority is false. The study argues that the reasons for the failure of mainstream macroeconom(etr)ics—in particular its poor predictive performance and interpretative weakness—reside in the implications of the neo-Walrasian legacy and the problems connected with the implementation of that program.     

团队道德风险的再研究

该文着重考察两人管理团队中搭便车的古典问题.与纯道德风险问题不同,我们设想企业中的个人能力也会影响团队的产出.应用一个两期模型,我们表明在一个阿尔钦?德莫塞茨型企业中,即使进行有限期博弈,每个成员的努力水平也会比传统理论预测的高.我们认为这是由于团队成员间的相互可观测性引起的.因此我们可认为,管理团队中的自我激励机制的存在缓解了搭便车现象,这也可能是团队组织存在的原因.     

An Epistemological Reflection on Social and Solidarity Economy

Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) is emerging as life affirming solutions to the global crises through the multiple ways people locally reinvent economic life on the margins of the capitalist system based on values of solidarity, reciprocity and sustainability. Although the SSE builds on a strong foundation of real practices and institutions of economic transformation as the way forward for us, this paper argues that this world of practice is in need of its theory to frame discourses and engage with the bigger picture with confidence as an alternative to the dominant economic paradigm. The author argues that the orthodox economics, with its ontological construct of the homo economicus, Cartesian dichotomy and logical positivist epistemology severely constrains our abilities to understand and appreciate economic alternatives based on ‘other’ rationalities. Hence, there is a need for an epistemological revolution to construct a coherent theoretical framework from the wreckages of the neoclassical economics for the SSE. This paper seeks to outline the basic structure and the key elements of the ontological and the epistemological framework for this ‘science-in-the-making’ as a step to stimulate further debate for a paradigm revolution.