We investigate experimentally whether social learners appreciate the redundancy of information conveyed by their observed predecessors' actions. Each participant observes a private signal and enters an estimate of the sum of all earlier-moving participants' signals plus her own. In a first...

Do people know their own risk preferences, or do risk choices change with experience and observation? We provide a clean and straightforward test in the laboratory. People make an initial decision concerning a lottery choice and then experience 24 practice periods in which they roll the dice,...

This Article sketches the goals of antitrust law, describes the causes and effects of anticompetitive pricing generally and supracompetitive pricing specifically, explains the inability of antitrust law to suppress some instances of supracompetitive pricing, establishes the importance of trust...

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to test whether and to what extent individuals succumb to the conjunction fallacy. Using the Kahneman and Tversky (1983) experimental design, we find that given mild incentives, the proportion of individuals who violate the conjunction...

A praxeological theory of interpersonal action. This theory is a proposed extension of Misesian praxeology into the realm of direct, person-to-person social interaction. The goal of praxeology is to discover and to make explicit “exact laws” of human action of the general form “if you do...

In this essay it is argued 1) that Ludwig von Mises's conception of thymology refers to the content of mental actions, and 2) that by Mises's own theory, standard economic propositions are not a priori propositions

One of the pillars of Hayekian social thought is Hayek’s contention that study of the market cannot be a priori. But Hayek seems not to have realized the implications of his own conception of the Pure Logic of Choice. He didn’t realize that the method of deductive analysis he envisioned...

The purpose of this paper is an introduction to methods for conducting inquiries in social sciences. A method of inquiry is an organized and systematic scientific approaches used by scholars for controlled investigations and experiments to efficiently solve theoretical and practical problems,...