In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter (Schumpeter 1954a) dismissed Adam Smith's Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976) in a blunt and ad hominem manner. We argue that Schumpeter's assessment resulted from his failure to appreciate the rhetorical structure of...

Heuristics are all around us, both in the real world and the literature. There are many of them and there are many — too many — definitions of them. In this chapter we focus on the history of fast and frugal heuristics, as sketched out comprehensively in Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Research...

The Allais Paradox, or Common Consequence Effect to be precise, is one of the most well-known behavioral regularities in individual decision making under risk. A common perception in the literature, which motivated the development of numerous generalized non‐expected utility theories, is that...

Retirement saving is an area now jam-packed with defaults meant to address delayed or absent decision making. Yet, getting individuals engaged with retirement saving decisions is critical to avoid unsuitable one-size-fits-all defaults and optimise accumulated wealth. We apply a...

I investigate the conjecture (proposed by his namesake Vernon L. Smith) that Adam Smith was afflicted by Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. I summarize the evidence confirming this conjecture. Concluding that on balance there is considerable evidence supporting Smith’s...

Background: Infertility affects one in eight couples worldwide. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is now considered a mainstream fertility treatment to increase the chance of conceiving a child in infertile individuals. The main cause of infertility is advanced female age due to the number and...

We study a setting where a buyer chooses one of several available options whose values are initially unknown but can be discovered through costly search. Search is sequential, with perfect recall, which implies it is optimal for the buyer to search until the best option encountered so far...

Over the past decades psychological theories have made significant headway into economics, culminating in the 2002 (partially) and 2017 Nobel prizes awarded for work in the field of Behavioural Economics. Many of the insights imported from psychology into economics share a common trait: the...

Draft of a contribution to Kincaid & Ross Modern Guide to Philosophy of Economics (Elgar). To talk in 2020 about the foundations of behavioural and experimental economics (BE and EE from here on), or for that matter the methodological and substantive relationships between economic and...