This paper offers three-way taxonomy of theories of beliefs. For rational theories, beliefs are determined by given information and updated via Bayes's rule. For normative theory, best represented by Hayek and sociological theory, beliefs are categories that precede information and, in fact,...

Review of: The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Ed. by N. J. Smelser, R. Swedberg. 1994. Princeton University Press: Princeton

The recent era of economic turbulence has generated a growing enthusiasm for an increase in new and original economic insights based around the concepts of reciprocity and social enterprise. This stimulating and thought-provoking Handbook not only encourages and supports this growth, but also...

Economists who emphasize path dependence generally dispute, at first approximation, the effectiveness of rational choice in understanding institutions. Such economists, belonging to the original (old) institutional economics and the historical school maintain that the constraint function is...

The paper identifies two major conceptual challenges facing evolutionary economics and shows how they parallel similar challenges facing evolutionary and developmental biology. One issue is the differentiation between learning-by-doing, on one hand, and habit formation, on the other. Another...

The thesis that judges could (voluntarily or not) promote efficiency through their decisions has largely been discussed since Posner put it forward in the early 1970s. There nonetheless remains a methodological aspect that has never (to our knowledge) been analyzed in relation to the...

Adam Smith's invisible hand metaphor (IH) is examined in light of two different accounts of the origin of traits: Charles Darwin's theory of evolutionary optimization and William Paley's theory of divine intervention. Smith's stand supersedes both accounts. For Smith, intermediating drives, such...