We wish to examine critically the viewpoint that: a) economists take too narrow a view of rationality and do not recognize the role of emotions as a component of rationality and b) do not address the question of whether preferences are rational or not, and instead take them as just given. We...

The purpose of the paper is to explore, from an assessment viewpoint, the ideas below. Economics, as a social science, has always considered sets of individuals with assumed characteristics, namely the level of knowledge, although in an implicit way in most of the cases. In this sense, an...

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in behavioral trends in both economic theory and practical applications. As a science with vast potential for explaining complex market behaviors, behavioral economics is drifting away from the classical model of homo oeconomicus deployed by...

The rational expectations hypothesis (REH) is the standard approach to expectations formation in macroeconomics. We discuss its compatibility with two strands of Karl Popper's philosophy: his theory of knowledge and learning, and his "rationality principle" (RP). First, we show that the REH is...

Public choice theory has originally been motivated by the need to correct the asymmetry, widespread in traditional welfare economics, between the motivational assumptions of market participants and policymakers: Those who played the game of politics should also be considered rational and...

This essay reviews new histories of the role of game theory and rational decision-making in shaping the social sciences, economics among them, in the post war period. The recent books "The World the Game Theorists Made" by Paul Erickson and "How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind" by Paul Erickson,...

The purpose of the paper is to explore, from an assessment viewpoint, the ideas below. Economics, as a social science, has always considered sets of individuals with assumed characteristics, namely the level of knowledge, although in an implicit way in most of the cases. In this sense, an...

Explaining individual behavior in politics should rely on the same motivational assumptions as explaining behavior in the market: That’s what Political Economy, understood as the application of economics to the study of political processes, is all about. In its standard variant, those who...

This paper provides an introduction to the field of evolutionary economics with emphasis on the evolutionary theory of household behavior. It shows that the goal of evolutionary economics is to improve upon neoclassical economics by incorporating more realistic and empirically grounded...

This paper considers an economic approach to autistic individuals, as a window for understanding autism, as a new and growing branch of neuroeconomics (how does behavior vary with neurology?), and as a foil for better understanding non-autistics and their cognitive biases. The relevant economic...