This article argues that within the current discussion of incentives in economics a crucial question is neglected: why are some incentives felt as very powerful reasons to alter actions at the same time as other incentives hardly manage to produce any effect at all, and while yet other...

In this article I argue that the study of contextual issues in economics has been limited in its scope because economists have mostly conceived of the environment as a constraint on individual action. I identify and discuss three conventions that pull economists into such conceptualization of...