Shackle and Behavioural Economics

This paper was published in 1999, a few years before Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. Many of us in the field of behavioral economics suspected that a Nobel Prize was in the works for our field, and we worried that it would be jointly conferred on behavioral economics and experimental economics by people who couldn’t tell the difference between them. The paper starts by pointing out that behavioral economics and experimental economics are entirely different enterprises. Behavioral economics is the application of insights from psychology (and sometimes other disciplines) to economics. Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to economics.

Surveillance in Barrett's Esophagus: Lessons from Behavioral Economics

Editorial

After 24 years the Nobel Prize for economics has again been awarded to an expert on the cognitive processes underlying decision-making. After the theorizer of bounded rationality, Herbert Simon, the prestigious award was attributed on 9 October 2002 to Daniel Kahneman, "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty". It is certainly not forcing the issue if we attempt to identify a link between the cognitive scientist Simon and the cognitive psychologist Kahneman. In fact, the former demonstrated how powerful formal models of rationality, put forward by logicians, mathematicians and economists to tackle problems involving choice, are faulty of an unjustified faith in man's rational capabilities. Simon (1981) in fact affirmed that "What a person cannot do he will not do, no matter how much he wants to do it", demonstrating through the direct observation of managerial behavior that organizations and individuals inside the organizations accept "good enough" alternatives. This behavior is not dictated by the fact that decision-makers prefer to act in this way, but because they have no other choice owing to the cognitive constraints that characterize the human mind. Kahneman, on the other hand, has elaborated an alternative theory to the standard decision-making theory. In this theory, the traditional rationality criteria used to define the economic player no longer fulfil the role of reference parameters used to assess the systematically distorted performance of individuals when making a decision or an estimate, and distortions are not regarded as an exception or the expression of human stupidity, but rather the normality "generated" by the same cognitive constraints that Simon argues underlie the bounded rationality of human behavior. Born in Tel Aviv in 1934, Daniel Kahneman studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he graduated at the age of twenty in Psychology and Mathematics. He moved to the United States where he enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley where he was awarded a Ph.D. in Psychology in 1961. After teaching Psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he became Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and the University of

Herbert A. Simon, 1916-2001

To explore the relation between early career performance or recognition and receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, we compare winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, the most prestigious early career recognition for economists, with other successful scholars. The initial comparison combines JBCM winners with scholars published in leading economics journals, controlling for educational background (institution conferring the Ph.D.) and publication and citation success. We then narrow the comparison group down to those given relatively early recognition (based on age category) in the form of other major awards. Lastly, we compare the JBCM awardees with synthetic counterfactuals that best resemble their pre-award academic career performance. All three analyses provide strong support for the notion that winning the JBCM is related to receiving the Nobel Prize, the award of which is also correlated with early career performance success as measured by number of publications and citations.

The Matthew effect has become a standard concept in science studies and beyond to describe processes of cumulative advantage. Despite its wide success, a rigorous quantitative analysis for Merton’s original case for Matthew effects—the Nobel Prize—is still missing. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the causal effect of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (hereafter the Nobel Prize in Economics). Furthermore, we test another of Merton’s ideas: successful papers can draw attention to cited references, leading to a serial diffusion of ideas. Based on the complete Web of Science 1900–2011, we estimate the causal effects of Nobel Prizes compared to a synthetic control group which we constructed by combining different matching techniques. We find clear evidence for a Matthew effect upon citation impacts, especially for papers published within 5 years before the award. Further, scholars from the focal field of the award are particularly receptive to the award signal. In contrast to that, we find no evidence that the Nobel Prize causes a serial diffusion of ideas. Papers cited by future Nobel laureates do not gain in citation impact after the award.

The concept of has hit news headlines in recent years following the implementation of nudge policies in many parts of the world, the establishment of behavioural policy units in some countries, and the award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to the behavioural economist Richard Thaler in 2017. However, questions remain about whether nudging is an optimal approach to policy-making. This book presents a critical approach to the study of nudging to highlight the foundations, rationale and effects of current policy-making trends in the neoliberal age of behavioural economics. In this provocative book, the author presents a re-examination of the methodological foundations of behavioural economics and its consequences for addressing the deep social and economic policy challenges of our times. It is argued that, although the concept of nudge proposed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein rejects the theorization of economic behaviour under models of strict rationality, nudge policies focus on methodological individualism in economic thinking and economic policy. The complexity of social and economic policy problems of the twenty-first century calls for a revision of our conceptual outlooks, and to increase recognition of the failure of methodological individualism in economics to address the unprecedented social, political, and environmental challenges of globalization. Offering a new take on the epistemological assumptions underlying behaviourally-informed policies, this book will prompt the general public to consider new ideas about the darker side of behavioural economics.

Nobel begets Nobel in economics

Chinese economists produce large and increasingly high-quality research output, yet they have not been considered for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Prevailing explanations, cultural bias or insufficient theoretical depth, rely on general assumptions. We integrate Bourdieu’s field theory and Merton’s normative structure of science to operationalize three Nobel-alignment dimensions: Nobel Query (NQ), Nobel Context (NC), and Nobel Time (NT). Using textual and metadata evidence from 2,604 articles in the Economic Research Journal (2000–2019), top in China and representative of the trend, we analyze the question types, levels of analysis, and timeline. Results show that applied “how” questions and domestically bounded contexts (firm/industry/national) dominate in those empirical studies. Despite strong empirical sophistication, Nobel-style inquiries are concentrated in a small set of subfields—especially econometrics, institutional economics, and financial economics. The timeline suggests a gradual convergence towards the Nobel Prize criteria since 2013. These patterns suggest that under-recognition reflects not only external gatekeeping but also internal research orientations that shape symbolic visibility. The NQ–NC–NT framework clarifies where convergence is occurring and identifies levers for translating policy relevance into generalizable contributions and for building international scholarly capital, with implications for journal strategy, collaboration networks, and training that privileges abstraction.

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to a Professor of Computer Sciences and Psychology is surprising but refreshing. Unlike many economists, Simon is more concerned with how decisions are made than with what decisions are made. His writings, although academic and theoretical, are concerned with the real world and are of practical value to the administrator. He is willing to accept evidence from any relevant source and has ranged widely over not only the disciplines of the social sciences but also the philosophies. Simon is well aware of the value of quantitative methods, but remains convinced of the great importance of value judgements in decision‐making. In view of the trends in modern society towards greater concern with aspects of welfare which are difficult to quantify, and the growing importance of the public sector, Simon's work is highly relevant to our times. It is in the best traditions of political economy, and is not remote from reality.

Since the early days of Cliometrics (the application of economic theory and quantitative methods to the study of economic history) in the 1960s, Jeffrey Williamson has been one of its most active contributors and his output shows no immediate signs of letting up. Furthermore, he has continued throughout to employ the basic cliometric tools of applied economic theory and quantitative analysis. In contrast, Douglass North and Robert Fogel, recognized with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics for their contributions in founding the field of cliometrics, have gone subsequently in more interdisciplinary directions. North has increasingly emphasized the importance of institutions and cultural norms while also incorporating perspectives from cognitive science. Fogel has increasingly incorporated biological approaches in his work and indeed by his own admission has left the field of economic history for an interest in health economics and a field he terms bio-demography. Throughout his career, Williamson has had numerous students and collaborators of considerable distinction in their own right. And this festschrift in his honor incorporates the work of several generations of cliometricians and can thus be regarded as providing an overview of developments in cliometrics over the past 40 years as well as the current state of play in the field.

The Nobel Prize in Economics celebrates decades of research in specific fields that have helped to improve the fundamental understanding of the subject and in many cases led to applications for attaining superior conditions of life. Since many parallel ideas emerge during the course of research, the relevance and criticality of these in addressing core concerns of the human being and the nature gets prominence for the award of the greatest accolade. Understanding sources of financial crisis and policies to lessen its impacts is a natural candidate for Nobel Prize, as has been the case for the award in 2022.

The paper presents the Chicago School economist Theodore Schultz's contributions to economic theory. Schultz is the only agricultural economist to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. The first part briefly describes the life of Theodore Schultz. The second part deals with his works in the economics of agriculture. The third part discusses his book The Economic Value of Education (Schultz, 1963). The fourth part analyses his work Investing in People (Schultz, 1981). The fifth part explores the book The Economics of Being Poor (Schultz, 1993). The sixth part outlines the book Origin of Increasing Returns (Schultz, 1993). The seventh part discusses his Nobel Prize lecture.

Herbert Alexander Simon was archived Turning Award in 1995 and Nobel prize in economics in 1978 defined learning as any process by which a system improves performance from experience [2].