In recent sociological studies of markets, especially financial markets, researchers have argued that economics is performative (MacKenzie, Callon et al.). By this they refer to the observation that theories such as the Black-Scholes formula do not simply describe reality, but contributed to the...

Recently, Glimcher has proposed a reductionist model of choice which directly reduces a modified version of economic utility theory to neuroscience. I propose an alternative conceptual framework that adopts the position of externalism, which I further narrow down to a distributed cognition...

China is the odd man out in the research on social capital and economic performance. A brief survey of recent World Values Survey data depicts China to be a high-trust, achievement oriented society, which does not fit into popular pictures of rampant corruption and abuses of power. I argue that...

Neuroeconomics stays in the center of the ongoing naturalistic turn in economics. It portrays the individual as a complex system of decision making mechanisms and modules. This results into a conceptual tension with the standard economic notion of the unity of the actor that is a systemic...

The concepts of quot;social capitalquot; and quot;networksquot; gain increasing acceptance even in core branches of economics as growth theory and international trade. International organizations have begun to condition credit approval on the availability of social capital in lender communities....

Dual systems theories play an important role in the conceptual foundations of behavioural economics, such as distinguishing between ‘fast' and ‘slow' responses to stimuli. After considering how behavioural economists use these dualities to legitimize policy interventions, I critically...

The canonical model of neuroeconomics centres on the notion of subjective value and analyses choice along the lines of neoclassical economics. Recently, this model has been challenged by approaches that introduce selectionist models of parallel and distributed neural networks. This perspective...

The paper develops a conceptual framework for the neuroeconomic analysis of money that is based on recent theories of distributed cognition. In doing this, I show that a unique historical contribution to the theory of money, Simmel's ‘Philosophy of Money', receives full support by recent...