Institutionalist economists have always been criticizing the neoclassical way of studying the economy, especially because of its obsession to a very strict and flawed formalism. This formalism receives critique also from advocates of agent-based computational economic (ACE) models. The criticism...

This paper is motivated by the observation that (1) socio economic analysis uses significantly less formalisms than mainstream economics, and (2) that there exist numerous situations in which socio economics could benefit from a more formal analysis. This is particularly the case if institutions...

This article uses the functional decomposition approach to modeling Mäki (2009b) to discuss the importance of methodological considerations before choosing a modeling framework in applied research. It considers the case of agent-based models and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models to...

Based on the ontological and epistemological problems and solutions exposed in the previous paper, we scrutinize the philosophical grounds of three main schools of economics. They are not opposing one another as solid blocks of incompatible ideas and theories, but each school contains...