Economists must collaborate courageously

The Methodology of Economists

Thirty-five years ago, E. C. Harwood, AIER's founder, wrote the following about the relation of economic conclusions to the methods of inquiry used by many economists: "That economists frequently do not agree has become so commonplace that some economists no longer seem to be troubled by the suggestion that such a state of affairs is scandalous. That many economists do agree on certain analyses...

The Games Economists Play

It is a source of confusion that economists for decades have worked on ‘game theory’ while studying economic behaviour. However, while not focused on games in the recreational sense this perspective does provide a highly meticulous complementary framework for the understanding of computer game structure and player behaviour. This article attempts to extract useful analytic concepts and insights...

Do Economists Lie More?

Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity to be without predictive value. However, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects are significantly less lie averse than other majors....

Preventing Economists’ Capture

Collaborate , compete and share

We introduce and study a model of an interacting population of agents who collaborate in groups which compete for limited resources. Groups are formed by random matching agents and their worth is determined by the sum of the efforts deployed by agents in group formation. Agents, on their side, have to share their effort between contributing to their group’s chances to outcompete other groups an...