There is ample evidence that people differ considerably in their preferences. We identify individual heterogeneity in type and strength of social preferences in a series of binary three-person dictator games. Based on this identification, we analyze response times in another series of games to investigate the cognitive processes of distributional preferences. We find that response time increases with the number of conflicts between individually relevant motives and decreases with the utility difference between choice options. The selfish motive is more intuitive for subjects who are more selfish. Our findings indicate that the sequential sampling process and the intuition of selfishness jointly produce distribution decisions, and provide an explanation for the mixed results on the correlations between response time and prosociality. Our results also show that it is important to take heterogeneity of preferences into account when investigating the cognitive processes of social decision making.

We suggest that overconfidence (conscious or unconscious) is motivated in part by strategic considerations, and test this experimentally. We find compelling supporting evidence in the behavior of participants who send and respond to others’ statements of confidence about how well they have scored on an IQ test. In two-player tournaments where the higher score wins, a player is very likely to choose to compete when he knows that his own stated confidence is higher than the other player’s, but rarely when the reverse is true. Consistent with this behavior, stated confidence is inflated by males when deterrence is strategically optimal and is instead deflated (by males and females) when luring (encouraging entry) is strategically optimal. This behavior is consistent with the equilibrium of the corresponding signaling game. Overconfident statements are used in environments that seem familiar, and we present evidence that suggests that this can occur on an unconscious level.

In a dyadic game, strategic asymmetric dominance occurs when a player's preference for one strategy A relative to another B is systematically increased by the addition of a third strategy Z, strictly dominated by A but not by B. There are theoretical and empirical grounds for believing that this effect should decline over repetitions, and other grounds for believing, on the contrary, that it should persist. To investigate this question experimentally, 30 participant pairs played 50 rounds of one symmetric and two asymmetric 3 × 3 games each having one strategy strictly dominated by one other, and a control group played 2 × 2 versions of the same games with dominated strategies removed. The strategic asymmetric dominance effect was observed in the repeated-choice data: dominant strategies in the 3 × 3 versions were chosen more frequently than the corresponding strategies in the 2 × 2 versions. Time series analysis revealed a significant decline in the effect over repetitions in the symmetric game only. Supplementary verbal protocol analysis helped to clarify the players’ reasoning and to explain the results.

Most studies that compare individual and group behavior neglect the in-group decision making process. This paper explores the decision making process within groups in a strategic setting: a two player power-to-take experiment. Discussions preceding group decisions are video taped and analyzed. We find the following: (1) no impact of the group setting as such on individual behavior; (2) heterogeneity of individual types; (3) perceptions of fairness are hardly discussed and are prone to the self-serving bias; (4) groups ignore the decision rule of other groups and typically view them as if they were single agents. (5) We also show that to explain group outcomes two factors have to be taken into account that are often neglected: the distribution of individual types over groups and the decision rules that groups use to arrive at their decision.

Faced with platforms such as Uber, riders are resisting individually and organising actions such as Riders X Derechos in Spain. Some of these ‘new proletarians’ have even organised themselves into cooperatives. To the global utopia of investor-owned platforms, platform cooperativism opposes the utopia of delivery without exploitation or carbon emissions through local cooperatives owned by riders. Based on the case study of the Mensakas cooperative in Barcelona, this ethnography analyses the link between riders’ protests and cooperative platforms. It questions the concrete effects of ‘counter-platform politics’ and the relationship between politics and labour. It also examines the strategies of intercooperation in the ‘cyclelogistical’ sector to understand the institutional, social, and political conditions that foster the ‘re-embeddedness’ of the bike delivery market.

This article argues that society is not a thing. It is abbreviated and adapted with permission from a public lecture, titled There Is No Such Thing as Society: Margaret Thatcher, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Social Science. The original was presented by Gavin Kitching to the Cuadernos de la Catedra Ludwig Wittgenstein at Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, in March 2019.

How do economists use graphs, and do they use them well? Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I provide evidence to these questions by exploring more than 2600 graphs published in the first issue of the American Economic Review from 1911 to 2017. I find that economists use a lot of line charts – more than 80% of the total sample are line charts. I also find that the share of graphs that use data (as opposed to diagrams) fell over the first half of the century and then increased from about the early 1980s to today, correlated with perceived graph quality.

Britain, like many other societies within the OECD, has been facing cumulative and interdependent social, political, and economic crises which came to a head shortly before COVID. The shock of COVID has accentuated these crises, creating a state of policy flux in which all long-established intellectual frameworks have proved inadequate: across the OECD, public policy has largely abandoned them. Fortunately, across the social sciences, history and philosophy there have been important new advances by major scholars which cohere and provide a more sophisticated account of society. While they will ultimately prove inadequate as new complexities emerge, for the present that offer the best guide available for policy. This essay provides an integrated review of this recent literature and relates it to some of the key policy problems.

Leeson (2020) objects to the conflation of economics with applied econometrics, and argues that economics instead should be thought of as the implications of the assumption that individuals maximize, i.e. rational choice theory. But, narrowly defining economics in terms of method demands that we ignore alternative theoretical frameworks which potentially hold explanatory power about topics thought of as economics, all for the sake of a definition. I suggest that applying rational choice theory and applying econometrics became the comparative advantage for economists relative to other social scientists by accidents of history. These comparative advantages largely persist. It is reasonable to call applications of both rational choice theory and econometrics to topics outside conventional economic topics ‘economics’ simply because these applications remain the comparative advantage of economists.

In this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis. The three claims under study are: (1) economics exhibits strong forms of institutional stratification and, as a byproduct, a rather pronounced internal hierarchy; (2) economists strongly conform to institutional incentives; and (3) modern mainstream economics is a largely self-referential intellectual project mostly inaccessible to disciplinary or paradigmatic outsiders. The validity of these claims is assessed by means of an interdisciplinary comparison of citation patterns aiming to identify peculiar characteristics of economic discourse. In doing so, we emphasize that citation data can always be interpreted in different ways, thereby focusing on the contrast between a “cognitive” and an “evaluative” approach towards citation data.

This article provides an initial (partial) estimate of silver quantities held within China around mid-18th century, utilising archival evidence related to wealth confiscations. Better future estimates for overall Chinese silver holdings could also facilitate more accurate estimation of Chinese silver (legal plus illegal) imports. Similar analyses for other world regions could eventually yield estimates for global silver stock holdings, useful in turn for improving global silver mining and trade flow estimates. Extensive contraband silver mining and silver trade are known to have escaped official recordation, by definition. If methodologies suggested herein prove successful, then parallel non-silver-trade-good estimates could follow. Current exclusive focus upon production and trade flows should be reevaluated in the context of linkages with accumulations of goods (wealth components). Economic history could someday provide a prominent stage for the historical study of wealth holdings, thereby furnishing context for increasing wealth concentrations observable worldwide today.

In economics, three nested organizational levels, namely behavioural, mental and neural, can be distinguished. They introduce specific theoretical or observable concepts and suggest their own models for choice making. If psycho-economics relates implemented actions to declared mental states, neuro-economics relates mental states to brain areas. Bridge principles can be defined which link concepts with similar interpretations at two successive levels. Thanks to these principles, relations or even models independently suggested at two successive levels may well be associated. Some prescriptive applications of these principles were more recently proposed, but they remain grounded on a too fragile basis.

Social and economie exchanges often occur between strangers who cannot rely on past behavior or the prospect of future interactions to establish mutual trust. Game theorists formalize this problem in several “one-shot” game – such as the trust game - predicting noncooperation – since the investor is not expecting trustee to reciprocate it is not rationally to invest. Bohnet and Zeckhauser (2004) suggest that, due to betrayal aversion, people seek to avoid situation in which one could be betrayed. We argue that this behavior could emerge also due to regret aversion.