In the last period of his professional life Mark Blaug (1927-2011) repeatedly intervened with a series of papers characterised by a critical attitude towards both Whig history and the formalist turn in modern economics. At the same time, however, he never abandoned his long standing commitment...

In economics, models, rather than theories, seem to be the fundamental units of appraisal and practitioners seem to hold in high esteem the criterion of ‘robustness’. In this paper we shall try to explicate the multifarious notion of robustness, and articulate it on three different...

We investigate the different ways in which the results of theoretical models can be ‘robust’. We identify three kinds of ‘robustness’: (1) robustness to changes in the model’s idealisations; (2) robustness to changes in the ‘background’ conditions; (3) robustness to changes in the...

In the last period of his professional life Mark Blaug (1927-2011) repeatedly intervened with a series of papers characterised by a critical attitude towards both Whig history and the formalist turn in modern economics. At the same time, however, he never abandoned his long standing commitment...

From a number of encyclopaedic entries (Economic methodology, Methodological pluralism, Economic “laws”, Economic models, Microeconomics, Utility) it should emerge the peculiar status of “laws” and “models” in economics.

The practice of dynamic pricing, so typical of low cost carriers, is generally regarded as a form of price discrimination between "leisure" and "business" travellers on the single flight or on the single route. Across different routes, however, things may go differently. If price increases in...

È argomento da tempo controverso se la dimensione “politica” dell’economia possa sopravvivere alla richiesta di rigore teorico e di adeguata formalizzazione matematica dei propri modelli. Talvolta sembra quasi ci si debba rassegnare ad avere una “scienza naturale” senza...

While economic methodologists seem to be increasingly dissatisfied with Lakatos's criteria of appraisal, many (internalist) historians of economic thought continue to rely on typically Lakatosian categories in order to identify portions of economic analysis whose historical development is to be...