Politics and economic rationality

Rationality and Institutional Contingency: the Varying Politics of Economic Regulation in the Fire Insurance Industry

Are the politics of economic regulation contingent on institutions? Drawing on arguments about institutional mediation and the institutional bases of rational action, we explore how institutions shape the dynamics invoked in two theories of regulation. We argue that institutional arrangements affect both the clarity and the content of group interests in regulation. Event history analyses of U.S...

Economic Rationality under Uncertainty

Though uncertainty pervades all aspects of life and human action, it has a rather short history in economics. Surprisingly, Daniel Bernoulli’s (1738) notion of expected utility, which suggests that (in games of chance) monetary risky ventures ought to be evaluated by the sum of utilities of outcomes weighted by the corresponding probabilities, was not immediately used in economic theory. Indeed...

Rationality review and the politics of public health.

Being Economic: Perspectives on Risk and Rationality

ion versus naturalism Much of the evidence for and against SEU and other candidate models is gleaned from controlled laboratory-based experiments. But it is not at all clear that the laboratory is the best environment in which to determine people’s responses to risk. At issue are the kinds of situations used to develop and test hypotheses and, specifically, the degree of abstraction/naturalism ...

The Politics of Economic Growth