The purpose of this chapter is to link Ronald Coase's methodological approach to what he ‘learned' when he was at the London School of Economics (LSE) from Edwin Cannan and Arnold Plant. The main lesson Coase taught us and insisted upon was that economics should not be too ‘abstract' and...

Kenneth Boulding's AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding's argument that economics could not be...

Ronald Coase (1910-2013), who sadly died at the remarkable age of 102, made significant contributions to economics based on common sense and the detailed study of his topics. Coase was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance...

Ronald Coase had a profound impact on scholarship worldwide, and not for his ideas alone. Coase’s ideas about transaction costs, the nature of the firm, the role of government, and the problem of social cost have been hugely influential. Throughout his long life, he also worked to change the...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...

This paper presents an overview of recent research in neuroeconomics, in the light of the question how these relate to institutional economics. I present a critique of Glimcher's recent internalist standard model of neuroeconomics and put forward the claim that only an externalist approach can...

This paper examines Geoff Hodgson’s interpretation of Veblen in agency-structure terms, and argues it produces a conception of reflexive economic agents. It then sets out an account of cumulative causation processes using this reflexive agent conception, modeling them as a two-part causal...

Economic methodology has mostly adhered to naturalism, whereby the social sciences are akin to natural sciences and adopt the same positivistic methods. Anti-naturalism, by contrast, asserts that the social sciences are different from natural sciences and need to develop their own methods...

The crisis in (financial) markets led to the failure of orthodoxy and should bring out a new theoretical and methodological framework to Economics. This essay discusses what is Economics and if it needs to move away from its normative dimension to assert itself as a producer of scientific...

The neoclassical synthesis has been defined as a bridge between Keynesian theory and Walrasian general equilibrium theory. The aim of this article is to show that founders of the neoclassical synthesis were not homogenous in their appraisal of the importance of Walrasian theory. To do so, we...