In his 2005 book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, North offers a rough account of economic change that can be called “culturalist economics.” In his account, he attributes the change of well being of individuals to, besides technology and demographics, cultural heritage or...

This article attempts to tackle a fundamental methodological question in economics. The task is to investigate whether competing traditions in the history of economics are commensurable or not, that is, whether there is a firm ground on which a researcher could adjudicate the truth content of a...

Advocates of natural selection usually regard rationality as redundant, i.e., as a mere linguistic device to describe natural selection. But this "Redundancy Thesis" faces the anomaly that rationality differs from natural selection. One solution is to conceive rationality as a trait selected by...

This three-volume set contains over seventy valuable references written by economists, psychologists and social scientists that examine the field of new behavioural economics. The articles demonstrate how new behavioural economics and decision sciences deal with different issues with almost the...

This paper traces temptations to biased beliefs—instead of the standard approach that traces temptations to biased tastes. The proposed theory affords, in two ways, a more general framework than what is afforded by the standard approach: First, to start with biased beliefs can simultaneously...

Third-party institutions (judges, real-estate agents, referees, mediators, and arbiters) are designed to avoid mis-coordination among potential cooperators. They differ from first-party institutions (lobbyists) who act as rent-seekers in bargaining. They also differ from second-party...

Routines and instincts are similar in terms of function and structure: 1) With respect to function, they economize on scarce decision-making resources, such as cognitive faculties, by making actions, within limits, inflexible vis-à-vis fluctuating environmental stimuli. As inflexible patterns,...