Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French thinker who did most of his writing in the last six years of his life. One of his major contributions to economic thought was his application of opportunity cost to a wide range of economic policies. The present paper uses the Bastiat approach to...

Português Resumo: Herbert Simon (1916-2001) foi um importante crítico do uso feito na Economia do conceito de racionalidade como fator explicativo básico do comportamento econômico, tendo criado e difundido para esse fim o conceito de racionalidade limitada. Segundo ele, a capacidade...

Nash is famous for many inventions, but it is less known that he, simultaneously with Marschak, also was the first to axiomatize expected utility for risk. In particular, these authors were the first to state the independence condition, a condition that should have been but was not stated by von...

Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated protection from...

Over two days in February 1988, several key experimental economists and cognitive psychologists met to explore the possibilities of joint research promoted by the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations under the rubric behavioral economics. The original vision that the meeting could open a line of...

Richard Musgrave coined the terminology of merit wants and merit goods in the 1950s in the context of the theory of public finance. He pointed out that certain goods such as free school lunches or subsidies to low cost housing did not have pure public or private good characteristics. If a...

This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson's mathematics. The paper sheds new lights on Samuelson's Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson's foundational ideas, embodied in...

Lionel Robbins 1932 Essay is one of the most influential methodological works in 20th century economics. This said, the Essay is not philosophically seamless; it exhibits certain tensions that are not easily reconciled within any specific philosophical characterization of scientific knowledge....

This paper begins with the interplay of the induced value theory and the Hayek hypothesis, and subsequently suggests that we need to understand Vernon Smith's experimental method as not simply empirical, but encompassing a commitment to a special version of neoclassical demand theory. To this...