In recent years, the government, of African Countries has assumed major responsibilities for economic reforms and growth. In attempting to describe their economies, economists (policymakers) in many African Countries have applied certain models that are by now widely known: Linear programming...

The key general problem in design, evaluating and defending an experimental design is to determine whether there are factors affecting experimental behavior that are not being duly taken into account. We present a relevance, distinctiveness and plausibility (RDP) framework for systematically...

In this paper we reply to Binmore and Shaked's criticism of the Fehr-Schmidt model of inequity aversion. We put the theory and their arguments into perspective and show that their criticism is not substantiated. Finally, we briefly comment on the main challenges for future research on social...

Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith were the joint recipients of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Kahneman's work challenges the assumption that individuals behave in a manner consistent with conventional economic wisdom. He maintains that individuals tend to be systematically error prone and...

Many have advanced observed exchange asymmetries as support for endowment effect theory and underlying prospect theory. These are very general theories about the nature of preferences, which, if accepted, have implications for applied economics in complex field settings. While we do challenge...

The recent move to import empirical results into law and policymaking have introduced challenges related to drawing proper inferences from quantitative studies. The purpose of this essay is to elaborate on three specific cautions on the use of economics experiment results. First, critiques of...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans — social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.We share with the 18th century Scots...

The paper analyses the methodology of economic lab experiments on human behaviour in the light of Barad's ‘agential realism'. Experimenters conventionally think that experiments identify properties that human individuals have, independent from the experimental setting (the ‘preferences' or...

The paper provides a review of research using virtual reality as a tool in experimental economics. It addresses the question of whether behavior in virtual environments is a valuable source of empirical evidence for economists. A typology of virtual reality experiments based on the difference...