Economists typically object to preference-based explanations of human behavior; differences in preferences “explain everything and therefore nothing”. But this argument is only correct assuming that no empirical evidence exists to discipline preference-based explanations. In fact, over the past decade, personality psychologists have produced a robust collection of stylized facts about human pre...

This short paper discusses majority and minority views in economics regarding the value of neuroscience for economics – and thus the value of the neuroeconomics research program. It argues that neuroeconomics’ reception ultimately depends on whether economists adopt a philosophy of science thinking closer to what exists in other sciences. It then argues that an inadvertent a product of this deb...

Our research is a variant of the third party punishment game that we call Solomon’s Game. The main feature of this game is that players can not only punish unfair people but also help those individuals who are the victims of that unfairness. The aim of this experiment is to compare the human tendency to punish unfair behavior to the desire to help victims of that unfairness, in presence of a bu...

This article updates Kelly and Bruestle (2011) by illustrating how publication trends in different subject categories in economics evolved from 2007 to 2013. Using data from RePEc we show that the largest increase in the relative share was for articles published in JEL category Q (“Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics, Environmental and Ecological Economics”) over this period. Furthermor...

Let me begin with a convention. I will refer to the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification as “the DJ distinction” (where I may note, for potentially misled younger readers, that this “DJ” has nothing to do with the music business). This paper is based on an older paper of mine (Hoyningen-Huene 1987). In the present paper, I will first recapitulate some of...