Japanese Consumption,External Disequilibrium and their Statistical Measurement

Georgescu-Roegen's work is usually divided into two categories, his earlier work on consumer and production theory and his later concern with entropy and bioeconomics beginning with his 1966 introductory essay to his collected theoretical papers published in the volume Analytical Economics. Most economists usually praise his earlier work on pure theory and ignore his later work which is highly critical of neoclassical economics. Those economists sympathetic to his later work usually take the position that he “saw the light” and gave up neoclassical theory some time in the 1960s to turn his attention to the issues of resource scarcity and social institutions. It is argued here that there is an unbroken path running from Georgescu's work in pure theory in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, through his writings on peasant economies in the 1960s, leading to his preoccupation with entropy and bioeconomics in the last 25 years of his life. That common thread is his preoccupation with “valuation.” The choices our species makes about resource use and the distribution of economic output depends upon our valuation framework. Georgescu-Roegen's work begins in the 1930s with a critical examination of the difficulties with the hedonistic valuation framework of neoclassical economics, moves in the 1960s to the conflict between social and hedonistic valuation, and culminates in the 1970s and 1980s with his examination of the conflict between individual, social, and environmental values. This paper traces the evolution of Georgescu-Roegen's thought about valuation and the environmental and social policy recommendations which arise out of his bioeconomic framework.     

Fully sincere voting

In a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategy-proofness may not be sensible, we call a social choice rule fully sincere if it never gives any individual an incentive to vote for a less-preferred alternative over a more-preferred one and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining. If the social choice rule can depend only on the number of votes that each alternative receives, those rules satisfying full sincerity are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters' preferences. We note a sense in which the natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal flexibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight.     

The road to rationalisation: A history of “Where the Empirical Lives” (or has lived) in consumer choice theory

This paper examines the different ways that economists have characterised the empirical content of modern consumer choice theory. There has been general agreement among economists that each stage in the development of the theory has been associated with an improvement in the theory's empirical content, and yet there has been no agreement about what exactly the empirical content of consumer choice theory is at any stage in the process. I call this the problem of observational ambiguity. The paper historically documents this problem, links it to various theoretical developments, and relates it to debates in contemporary economic theory.     

Sen’s criticism of revealed preference theory and its ‘neo-samuelsonian critique’: a methodological and theoretical assessment

This paper evaluates how Amartya Sen’s critique of revealed preference theory (RPT) stands against the latter’s contemporary, ‘neo-Samuelsonian’ version. Neo- Samuelsonians have argued that Sen’s arguments against RPT are innocuous, in particular once it is acknowledged that RPT does not assume away the existence of motivations or other latent psychological or cognitive processes. Sen’s claims that preferences and choices need to be distinguished and that external factors need to be taken into account to analyze the act of choice then appear to be irrelevant. However, while it is true that contemporary revealed preference theory (CRPT) partially evades Sen’s critique, I show that the latter is still relevant outside the restricted areas of consumer choice and market dynamics. In particular, Sen’s views regarding the importance of incomplete preferences and the multiplicity of levels of agency can hardly be integrated into the framework of CRPT. This is a significant limit, given the imperialistic claims of some of the proponents of the latter.     

A brain imaging study of the choice procedure

We study the behavior of subjects facing choices between certain, risky, and ambiguous lotteries. Subjects' choices are consistent with the economic theories modeling ambiguity aversion. Our results support the conjecture that subjects face choice tasks as an estimation of the value of the lotteries, and that the difficulty of the choice is an important explanatory variable (in addition to risk and ambiguity aversion).The brain imaging data suggest that such estimation is of an approximate nature when the choices involve ambiguous and risky lotteries, as the regions in the brain that are activated are typically located in parietal lobes. Thus such choices require mental faculties that are shared by all mammals, and in particular are independent of language. In contrast, choices involving partial ambiguous lotteries additionally produce an activation of the frontal region, which indicates a different, more sophisticated cognitive process.     

A dimensionally consistent aggregation framework for biophysical metrics

We develop a formal representation of the economy-ecosystem interaction problem by distinguishing between stock-flow, and fund-flux spaces (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). We then define dimensionless quantities in both the cardinal stock-flow space and the ordinal fund-flux space. This leads to analytic definitions of natural capital and natural income in the fund-flux space. We show that a stock-fund representation of the economy-ecosystem interaction problem helps investigate aggregation properties of biophysical metrics. In particular, we show how a metric that is dimensionally consistent in the stock-flow space can have dimensional problems in the fund-flux space. Ecological footprint is used as an illustrative example. Finally, we argue that dimensionally consistent metrics are keys to further the development of biophysical assessments as a tool for practical environmental policy.     

公共选择理论与交易成本政治学的比较分析

作为当代西方新政治经济学的重要组成部分,公共选择理论与交易成本政治学存在着共识,但是,兴起于公共选择理论之后的交易成本政治学增进了对政治领域的交易及制度的理解,弥补了公共选择理论的不足。换言之,交易成本政治学提高了对于政治世界的理解水平。通过对公共选择理论与交易成本政治学的比较分析,厘清二者之间的共识与差异,有助于辨析政治学和经济学整合发展的趋势。     

我国对外直接投资产业选择的适用理论和参照基准

对外直接投资作为推动我国产业结构高度化、提升国际竞争力的新增长点,越来越受到学者们的重视。本文从对外直接投资的产业选择这一宏观层面,分析评述可为我国借鉴的对外直接投资理论,并在此基础上,就我国产业选择的基准,提出若干政策建议。     

Prospect theory in the wild: how good is the nonexperimental evidence for prospect theory?

ABSTRACT

Prospect theory is widely thought to be one of the best-confirmed accounts of human decision-making under risk. There are numerous claims in the literature that various kinds of nonexperimental, observational evidence provide strong support for prospect theory. We investigate the veracity of these claims using a set of philosophy of science morals and a careful delineation of models of choice under risk, focussing on the extant versions of prospect theory and their various components. We challenge the claim that prospect theory is well supported because it explains the equity premium puzzle. In addition, we analyse a major international survey thought to support prospect theory and argue that the support is questionable, both for statistical reasons and because the evidence itself is mixed. Our analyses highlight some important ideas in the philosophy of science and caution against strong claims about support for prospect theory that rely on nonexperimental, observational evidence.     

Revealed group preferences on non-convex choice problems

Summary. This paper studies the conditions under which the basic results of the revealed preference theory can be established on the domain of choice problems which include non-convex feasible sets; the exercise is closely related to the works of Peters and Wakker (1991) and Bossert (1994). We show that while no continuous choice function can satisfy strong Pareto optimality over the class of all compact and comprehensive choice problems, strong Pareto optimality, Arrow's choice axiom, upper hemicontinuity and a weak compromisation postulate turn out to be necessary and sufficient to represent choice correspondences by continuous, strictly increasing and quasiconcave real-valued functions. Some applications of our main findings to axiomatic bargaining theory are also studied. Received: December 2, 1996; revised version: February 27, 1998