The paper designs a quantum model of decision-making (QMDM) that utilizes neuroscientific evidence. The new model provides both normative and positive implications to economics. First, it enhances the study of decision-making which is an extension of the expected utility theory (EUT) in mathematical economics. Second, we demonstrate how the quantum model mitigates drawbacks of the expected util...

Arguably nothing is more important to long-run improvement in human well being than a high quality basic education for every child and this has been enshrined as a development goal even before there were development goals. Promoting the achievement of this goal around the world requires a serviceable general positive model of education policies—a coherent causal explanation of why governments a...

This article describes the evolution and key features of the centralized environmental regulatory systems that emerged in the United States and Europe during the latter half of the twentieth century. It applies insights from the positive economic analysis of regulatory centralization in an attempt to explain a striking paradox found in both the European and American centralized environmental re...

A comparative sociologist who has spent her international career in academia—Marion Fourcade—and a practically minded academic economist with an extended stint in the Swiss government—Aymo Brunetti—offer their views on the role of economists in politics and society. Although Fourcade and Brunetti differ a lot in terms of experience and interest, their insightful and nuanced assessments of econo...

This paper addresses the question of why, in spite of its recent success, behavioral economics does not influence most discussions about how economic policy ought to be made. Failing to penetrate into contemporary discourse on leading policy issues is a serious problem, because behavioral techniques often point to policy prescriptions that are at odds with the prescriptions which follow from mo...

The paper compares the various theses that have been offered about valueneutrality in economics and examines the main available arguments in turn. The extreme non-neutrality thesis (universal value-impregnation) and the extreme neutrality thesis (there is no normative economics) are rebutted, and the analysis is then oriented towards settling the dispute between two intermediary variants. In co...

The general equilibrium analysis of perfectly competitive markets plays a central role in most attempts by positive economics to describe what happens in a market economy. It is usually admitted that there may be barriers to competition, that markets may be incomplete, and information may be lacking. Nevertheless, as a theoretical ideal which may approximate reality, general equilibrium analysi...

This chapter examines economists’ indefensible attachment to the positive-normative distinction, and suggests a behavioral economics explanation of their behavior on the subject. It reviews the origins of the distinction in Hume’s guillotine and logical positivism, and shows how they form the basis for Robbins’ understanding of value neutrality. It connects philosophers’ rejection of logical po...