Suchergebnisse

In The Community of Advantage, Robert Sugden advocates a system of universal social insurance to ensure that all citizens enjoy the benefits of market institutions. The Community of Advantage however does not shed light on the extent of redistribution that social insurance should provide. While the criterion of mutual advantage seems to licence only a minimal level of insurance, people's expectations and collective bargaining power are likely to lead to a much more extensive redistribution. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since a well-functioning society is more than a well-functioning market economy. An extensive social insurance protects the rich, the poor, and, above all, the cooperative attitudes without which a democratic society cannot function well.

Recent debates on the nature of preferences in economics have typically assumed that they are to be interpreted either as behavioural regularities or as mental states. In this paper I challenge this dichotomy and argue that neither interpretation is consistent with scientific practice in choice theory and behavioural economics. Preferences are belief-dependent dispositions with a multiply realizable causal basis, which explains why economists are reluctant to make a commitment about their interpretation.

I argue in my target article that field evidence does not support the costly punishment hypothesis. Some commentators object to my reading of the evidence, while others agree that evidence in favour of costly punishment is scant. Most importantly, no rigorous measurement of cost-benefit ratios in the field has been attempted so far. This lack of evidence does not rule out costly punishment as a cause of human cooperation, but it does pre-empt some overconfident claims made in the past. Other commentators have interpreted my article as an anti-experimental pamphlet or as a flat denial of the existence of pro-social motives which it was not intended to be. While we have enough data to establish the existence (and theoretical relevance) of strong reciprocity motives, I argue in this response that their efficacy (and policy relevance) has not been demonstrated. © 2012 Cambridge University Press.

Group identity can influence significantly people's attitudes toward monetary allocations. In this paper we reassess the representation of group identity using social preference models. First, we show that the influence of group identity varies unsystematically across different types of mini-dictator games and cannot be described using a well-behaved preference function. Second, we demonstrate that the effect is not robust to slightly increasing the complexity of the task, suggesting that group identity is a framing effect that can be easily displaced by alternative decision heuristics.

We propose a new framework to unify three conceptions of institutions that play a prominent role in the philosophical and scientific literature: the equilibria account, the regulative rules account, and the constitutive rules account. We argue that equilibrium-based and rule-based accounts are individually inadequate, but that jointly they provide a satisfactory conception of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium. In the second part of the paper we show that constitutive rules can be derived from regulative rules via the introduction of theoretical terms. We argue that the constitutive rules theory is reducible to the rules-in equilibrium theory, and that it accounts for the way in which we assign names to social institutions.

A series of recent debates in experimental economics have associated demand effects with the artificiality of the experimental setting and have linked it to the problem of external validity. In this paper, we argue that these associations can be misleading, partly because of the ambiguity with which "artificiality" has been defined, but also because demand effects and external validity are related in complex ways. We argue that artificiality (understood as unfamiliarity of the experimental environment) may be directly as well as inversely correlated with demand effects. We also distinguish between the demand effects of experimentation and the reactions that they may trigger and that might endanger experimental validity. We conclude that economists should pay more attention to the way in which subjects construe the experimental task and learn to exploit subjects' reactivity to expectations in their experiments.