Search results for "economic methodology"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Waging War Against Mechanical Man. Frank H. Knight's Critique of Behavioristic Psychology
2002
The major theme of this essay is to explore the rationale of Knight's campaign against the adoption of behaviorism in economics. We also attempt to qualify whether Knight's methodological criticism may somewhat undermine his recently acquired credentials as an institutionalist economist. In so doing we focus our attention in particular, but not exclusively, on his debate with the institutionalist Morris A. Copeland. In the first section we try to explain why behaviorism gained consensus among institutional economists, and we also provide a brief overview of the main behavioristic themes as they were presented in contemporary economic literature. The second section is devoted to Knight's rea…
“A certain amount of ‘recantation’”: On the origins of Frank H. Knight’s antipositivism
2016
The aim of this paper is to investigate in some detail the origins of Knight’s antipositism and to assess the main influences that brought him to a change in methodological perspective after 1921. As importantly, what follows is also an attempt to increase our general understanding of the methodological debates taking place during the early decades of the last century and to shed new light on the inherently pluralistic character of US interwar economics. This paper is organized as follows: the first section outlines Knight’s methodological views as presented in his early works; the second section discusses Knight’s “recantation” and his attack on behavioristic social science; the third sect…
Le problème du réalisme des hypothèses en économie politique
2010
This is a version, slightly corrected in 2010 with regard to form, of a working paper produced in 1968. Its subject is the problem of the realism of assumptions in economics. It offers an interpretation of Milton Friedman's famous essay of 1953 in which, contrary to most discussions, Friedman's solution to the problem does make sense. Under that interpretation, Friedman does not assert that one should test the consequences of a theory but not its assumptions, that one can predict but not explain, or that individuals behave as if they were rational and firms as if they maximized profits. Such assertions do not make sense and ascribing them to Friedman makes criticism of his position much too…
Review of Marcel Boumans and Matthias Klaes (eds) (2013). Mark Blaug: Rebel with Many Causes. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar
2015
Mark Blaug passed away on November 18, 2011. To honor his memory, two events were held in March 2012: a Memorial Conference at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics, Rotterdam (NL), and a seminar hosted by the Scottish Centre for Economic Methodology at the University of Glasgow (UK). As Marcel Boumans and Matthias Klaes point out in their editorial Introduction, this book contains a collection of papers given at these two events and includes some additional papers submitted by people who were not able to attend the meetings “at such short notice” (p. 5). In addition, the book carries a Foreword by Alan Peacock and consists of two parts: part I has four chapters—written by John…
Maux de l'économie, mots des économistes
1990
International audience; La méthodologie économique a largement séparé les discours (hypthèses, théorie, corps de pensée) de l'action (représentée essentiellement par les applications ou les descriptions monographiques). Dans cet essai, avec la plus large prudence répondant à une démarche balbutiante, nous tentons de donner des représentations synthétiques, sur longue période, de l'évolution de la littérature économique ; ceci au moyen des méthodes usuelles de l'analyse des données. Il reste, quelque soit les résultats auxquels nous parvenons, que ce type de traintement repose sur l'hypothèse d'avoir pris en compte chaque production de littérature comme un objet statistique simple. L'applica…
An Economic Definition of the City
1998
International audience
The three wives problem and Shapley value
2015
We examine the Talmudic three wives problem, which is a generalization of the Talmudic contested garment problem solved by Aumann and Maschler (1985) using coalitional procedure. This problem has many practical applications. In an attempt to unify all Talmudic methods, Guiasu (2010, 2011) asserts that it can be explained in terms of “run-to-the-bank”, that is, of Shapley value in a “cumulative game”. It can be challenged because the coalitional procedure yields the same result as the nucleolus, which corresponds to a “dual game”. As Guiasu's solution is paradoxical (it has all the appearances of truth), my contribution consists in explaining the concepts, particularly truncation, that play …
Rethinking exchange and prices
2017
Our monetary economies of production are not based upon relative exchanges described by the standard theory. Money is neither a commodity nor a positive asset; it cannot be exchanged against physical goods and services. It follows that payments do not consist of mutual transfers of commodities. In fact, each producer working for the needs for the community produces wealth for himself. Further, transactions on any markets are absolute exchanges. One of the consequences of this is that market prices do not measure wealth; rather, they are coefficients of redistribution of products.
Was Frank Knight an institutionalist?
2005
This paper critically examines Geoffrey Hodgson's recent provocative claim about Frank Knight as being a member of American institutionalism in the interwar years. In the first section of the paper the authors attempt to provide a definition of institutionalism and to emphasize its meaning from a historiographic point of view. The second and third sections analyze the two main methodological struggles between Knight and the institutionalists, namely, the debate during the early 1020s over the use of instinct theory as an explanation of economic behavior, and the subsequent campaign led by Knight in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the behaviorist wing of American institutionalism à la…
Processus d’agglomération et définition de la ville
1997
International audience