The “cashew conundrum” is a seminal event in the history of economics. Professor Richard Thaler observed that his guests were happier not having option to consume pre-dinner cashews. fact people can be with fewer options directly contradicts core assumptions neoclassical economics, and labeled an “anomaly” by behavioral Far from being surprising, cashew phenomenon predicted biological methods f...

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/res A large and growing share of the American total is spent, not on doctors and nurses, but on accountants, management consultants, and public relations specialists. Their contribution to the health of the American public is difficult to discern (unless one is trained in neoclassical economics and is able to see with the eye of faith). R.G. Evans, ...

More than thirty years ago, Charnes, Cooper and Schinnar (1976) established an enlightening contact between economic production functions (epfs) — a cornerstone of neoclassical economics — and information theory, showing how a generalization of the Cobb-Douglas production function encodes homogeneous functions. As expected by Charnes et al., the contact turns out to be much broader: we show how...

In the past decades, a canonical type of economic growth models has emerged. It is often dubbed the neoclassical growth model, and it provides the backbone of much research in climate economics. An excellent presentation is given by Barro and Sala-i-Martin (2003), the best application in climate economics is due to Nordhaus (2008). This model type has its problems, and there are strong reasons ...

Economists have confined the concept of ‘sustainability’ to intertemporal distributional equity. We propose a broader definition, combining dynamic efficiency and intergenerational equity, and relate it to two concepts from neoclassical economics: potential Pareto-improvements and inter-personal compensation.  2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Labour economics is often taken by vivid discussions about the specificity of the labour market and the need to develop a different approach, away from the current standard microeconomics. What is often forgotten is that this was not always the case. Labour research in the interwar years was quite different from what we regard presently as labour economics, being much more broadly and loosely d...

Professional sociology in the U.S. began as a field area within economics, but gradually emerged as a separate discipline. Using new data on joint meetings and the separation of departments, I track interdisciplinary relations through three phases: sponsorship (1890-1905), collaboration (1905-1940), and disengagement (post-1940). In the early years, sociology was mostly a branch of economics de...

Modern legal scholars frequently and increasingly base their analyses on the assumption, grounded largely in the extensive experimental literature, that individuals are subject to a number of systematic behavioral biases. Within the legal literature, behavioral economic analysis has been relied upon to generate a significant number of proposals for paternalistic regulation. These proposals are ...