What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scienti�c theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behav- ioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

By randomising the order in which new economics research papers are presented in email alerts and tracking economists’ subsequent download activity, this paper uses a natural field experiment to better understand the reasons why individuals show a disproportionate tendency to select items...

In Albers & Albers (Spring, 2013) we demonstrated that the historic development of U.S. real GNP, 1869-present, may be structured in recurring 14-year periods. A steady-state rate of growth of 3.4969% is thereby calculated, generating an increase in real GNP proportional to the famous “Golden...

These couple of pages discuss upon the retroactive influence (Systemic Retroactive game, or SyR) between people’s behaviour and environment. The latter is intended as physical environment (type of cities, climate, geography…), normative environment (laws), moral environment (religions,...

We introduce a “reason-based” way of rationalizing an agent’s choice behaviour, which explains choices by specifying which properties of the options or choice context the agent cares about (the “motivationally salient properties”) and how he or she cares about these properties (the...

The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate how the interaction of the structural axiomatic core and the behavioral propensity function produces plausible outcomes in the product market. The propensity function is a compact formal expression of random, semi-random, and deterministic...

The paper critically discusses the issue of rationality and choices in economics in both the behavioural and evolutionary approaches. Our study aims, on the one hand, to highlight the scientific contributions of psychology in economics, since psychology, and with it the theoretical approach of...

There is a surprising disconnect between formal rational choice theory and philosophical work on reasons. The one is silent on the role of reasons in rational choices, the other rarely engages with the formal models of decision problems used by social scientists. To bridge this gap, we propose a...

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Instead, pref- erences are usually assumed to be �xed and exogenously given. Building on related work on reasons and rational choice (Dietrich...