Building on Lea and Webley’s drug theory of money, the paper connects different theoretical resources to develop a Darwinian theory of money. The central empirical observation is the neuroeconomic result of the independent role of money as a reinforcer, which matches with a series of other...

The standard economic treatment of knowledge mixes a mentalist approach in game theory and an externalist approach in growth theory and related fields. This confusing state requires a philosophical clarification. I propose to start out from F.A von Hayek’s approach developed in his book on The...

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...

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...