Modern behavioral experiments are not economic history

Modern behavioral experiments are not economic history.

It is ironic that an article titled ‘‘Recordkeeping alters economic history by promoting reciprocity’’ (1) contains no evidence at all from economic history. ‘‘Economic history’’ is typically defined as the empirical record of past economic practices and processes. The fact that recordkeeping by modern subjects alters the result of a game is not directly informative about past economies; a cruc...

Science is not enough: the modern history of pediatric pain.

The early modern scientific work on pediatric pain emanated mostly from postwar Europe and was focused on recurrent pains. The seminal work was by Vahlquist [25,26], and later by Bille [10] in Sweden. Vahlquist’s research on pediatric headache in Stockholm and Bille’s doctoral dissertation, a large-scale epidemiologic study of the children of Uppsala, laid the foundation for the many subsequent...

Discrete Choice Experiments Are Not Conjoint Analysis

We briefly review and discuss traditional conjoint analysis (CA) and discrete choice experiments (DCEs), widely used stated preference elicitation methods in several disciplines. We pay particular attention to the origins and basis of CA, and show that it is generally inconsistent with economic demand theory, and is subject to several logical inconsistencies that make it unsuitable for use in a...

Economic History Association The Economic Theory of Sharecropping in Early Modern France

Economic models are not evolutionary models

Henrich et al. reject the “selfishness axiom” within a narrowly-defined economic model, and are premature in claiming that they have demonstrated cross-cultural variability in “selfishness” as defined in broader evolutionary theory. We also question whether a key experimental condition, anonymity, can be maintained in the small, cohesive, social groupings employed in the study. The authors of t...