We extend the logical model of agency known as the KGP model, to support agents with normative concepts, based on the roles an agent plays and the obligations and prohibitions that result from playing these roles. The proposed framework illustrates how the resulting normative concepts, including the roles, can evolve dynamically during the lifetime of the agent. Furthermore, we illustrate how t...

Abstract James Buchanan would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019. This serves as an inspiration to look at the future of public choice and question how much normativity can bear. In our analysis we draw parallels between German ordoliberalism (and its source Freiburg School Economics). We argue that reception exemplifies easy-to-grasp pitfalls should be taken seriously. anchor agenda a ...

Costs (e.g. energetic expenditure) and benefits (e.g. food) are central determinants of behavior. In ecology and economics, they are combined to form a utility function which is maximized to guide choices. This principle is widely used in neuroscience as a normative model of decision and action, but current versions of this model fail to consider how decisions are actually converted into action...

T he fundamental approach to policy prescription in economics derives from the recognition that the presence of market failures—like externalities, public goods, monopoly, and imperfect competition—creates room for well-designed public interventions to improve social welfare. This tradition, already clear in Pigou (1912), was elaborated by Samuelson (1947), and still provides the basis of most ...

In the last decade, with the publication of his Complete Works, there has been renewed interest in Walras’s methodology, mostly in the French economic literature. In particular, some scholars have argued that Walras characteristically confused positive and normative statements, a mistake all the more surprising given his impressive knowledge of philosophy (the so-called ‘Walras paradox’). This ...