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AbstractSince the 1990s, Sunstein, Jolls, and Thaler have questioned the perfect rationality assumption in law and economics (L&E) and introduced a behavioral approach. But Gregory Mitchell has criticized behavioral law and economics (BL&E). He argues that much of the scholarship within the field describes psychological research as if it provides general laws of thought and behavior rather than insights conditional on the setting, on the characteristics of subjects, and on the specificity of the task in hand. Human heterogeneity is not adequately included in models developed under behavioral assumptions of this kind. This paper argues that Mitchell's work contributes to develop a cognitive approach to Law closer to the cognitive theory of institutions and to the Original Institutional Economics (OIE). Mitchell's contextualist approach seeks to identify the specific conditions under which irrational behavior occurs and to understand when and how it can be remedied.

This paper investigates two different approaches to the analysis of institutions using game theory and discusses their methodological and theoretical implications for further research. Starting from von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory, we investigate, how Schotter and Schelling's approaches to the analysis of economic institutions contribute to develop a proper cognitive method to investigate institutions as the unplanned outcome of self- interested individual behavior? While the game theory model developed by Schotter does not allow to encompass the complexity of decision-making processes leading to the emergence of institutions, Schelling's empirical approach contributes to the cognitive inquiry into economic institutions and it opens the way to an interdisciplinary research method in which pure theory, empirical research and insight coming from different research fields work together. Starting form Schelling's work it is possible to draw the progress achieved by the cognitive economics of institutions and to suggest the need of further experimental and empirical research to better understand the cognitive dynamics that shape human behavior and influence the emergence of economic institutions.

Chez l'Homme, les décisions ne sont pas seulement déterminées par la rationalité, mais se trouvent également fortement influencées par les émotions. Les recherches en neurosciences ont montré que le cerveau attribue une valeur affective à chacune des alternatives d'un choix. Cette valeur affective est basée sur une expérience émotionnelle actuelle ou anticipée. Les circuits neuronaux liés aux réponses émotionnelles sont réactivés lors d'un choix, au moment où le cerveau anticipe les futures conséquences de ce choix. Ces patterns d'activations résultent de mécanismes d'apprentissage liés à l'accumulation d'expériences émotionnelles. Nous décrivons ici les bases théoriques de ces processus adaptatifs liés au regret ainsi que les mécanismes neuronaux associés.

AbstractThe article proposes a reading of Marcel Mauss's insights into gift exchange in primitive societies through the lens of the institutional economics approach. It thus tries to demonstrate that the gift as seen by Mauss can be interpreted as an institution arising from the self-transcendence of social relationships that gifts themselves are expressly designed to create and according to which individuals orient their behavior. On this basis, we provide elements to discuss the benefits that might derive from the adoption of the institutionalist approach in economics.