Studies at the Intersection of Philosophy and Economics

 

Rationality, Markets, and Morals: RMM Band 3 (2012)

The comment addresses the subtle differences that exist between economics and political science in terms of how the standards for the empirical quantitative research are set. It shows that the common methodology is applied by the disciplines in a different fashion. These differences could become obstacles for communication, but could also provide fruitful background for discussion of disciplines, if one explicitly takes them into account.
Although governance is about interpersonal relationships, it appears that the antecedents and consequences of affective bonds (social ties) in social groups dealing with commonpool resources and public goods have been neglected. The welfare costs of the neglect of such bonds and their dynamic properties in economics are unclear but may be substantial. In this paper, I discuss a theoretical `dual process‘ social ties model and the behavioral experimental and recent neurological evidence this model has obtained. Furthermore, a number of implications and institutional issues are addressed.
This article motivates and discusses José Bernardo’s attempt to reconcile the subjective Bayesian framework with a need for objective scientific inference, leading to a special kind of objective Bayesianism, namely reference Bayesianism. We elucidate principal ideas and foundational implications of Bernardo’s approach, with particular attention to the classical problem of testing a precise null hypothesis against an unspecified alternative.
The paper discusses the application of Elinor Ostrom’s Social Ecological Systems (SES) framework, using as example a community organization in Costa Rica, which collectively extracts turtle eggs. The paper does so with the particular aim of examining the coevolving relationship between political science and economics. The SES framework is understood as a useful exploratory tool, which was introduced into a joint research agenda from a political science perspective. The breadth of its approach enables it to capture empirically observable diversity. In this sense it provided a perfect complement to the more partial view that economics brought into the coevolving research process.
During the last 50 years, at least four interdisciplinary developments have occurred at the boundaries of political science and economics that have affected the central questions that both political scientists and economists ask, the empirical evidence amassed as a new foundation for understanding political economies, and new questions for future research. These include: (1) the Public Choice Approach, (2) the Governance of the Commons debate, (3) New Institutional Economics, and (4) Behavioral Approaches to Explaining Human Actions. In this short essay, I briefly review the challenges that these approaches have brought to political science and some of the general findings stimulated by these approaches before identifying some of the major issues on the contemporary agenda.

Journal Information

RMM is an interdisciplinary open access journal focusing on issues of rationality, market mechanisms, and the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects. It provides a forum for dialogue between philosophy, economics, and related disciplines, encouraging critical reflection on the foundations and implications of economic processes.

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