This paper is an attempt to understand Robert E. Lucas’s microfounded models of the 1960-70s as results of a structuralist project. It is argued that the way Lucas derived macroeconomic outcomes from the decisions of market agents is in line with the basic tenet of the semirealist version of...

There is a striking contrast between the significance of Harold Hotelling’s contribution to industrial economics and the fact that his location model was invalid, unrealistic and non-robust. It is difficult to make sense of the explanatory value of Hotelling’s model based on philosophical...

Adam Smith hat in seinem Bild des Menschen der Rolle der Imagination einen so großen Stellenwert eingeräumt, dass es berechtigt ist, ihn als Bildanthropologen zu bezeichnen. Der Aspekt des Bildvermögens von Menschen geriet im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Geschichte der Wirtschaftstheorie...

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...

The aviation industry changed dramatically in the wake of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. My paper looks at an element of this transformation - the policy according to which take off and landing slots were allocated at congested airports including a proposal to change this policy - an...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...

The concept of 'the core' originates in cooperative game theory and its introduction to economics in the 1960s as a basis for proofs of existence of general equilibrium is one of the earliest attempts to use game theory to address big questions in economics. Discovery of the core was met with...

After the publication of Keynes' "General Theory," economics was frequently described as schizophrenia: (neo-) classical at the micro-level, but Keynesian at the macro-level. In actuality, Keynes' revolution was, to a substantial part, based on the behavioral micro-foundations of the world we...

Keynes' General Theory (GT) ist in zweierlei Hinsicht umfassender als das (neo-) klassische Modell: (1) sie schließt das Vollbeschäftigungsgleichgewicht als Sonderfall ein und (2) sie basiert auf realistischem mikroökonomischem Verhalten, dessen sozial isolierter, den Eigennutz maximierender...

Whereas many others have scrutinized the Allais paradox from a theoretical angle, we study the paradox from an historical perspective and link our findings to a suggestion as to how decision theory could make use of it today. We emphasize that Allais proposed the paradox as a normative argument,...