Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T21:12:26.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

People are intuitive economists under the right conditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Alan Jern
Alan Jern*
Affiliation:
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, IN 47803. [email protected]://wordpress.rose-hulman.edu/jern/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Boyer & Petersen (B&P) argue that a “rudimentary exchange psychology” is responsible for many of people's folk-economic beliefs that are at odds with the consensus views of economists. However, they focus primarily on macroeconomic beliefs. I argue that the same rudimentary exchange psychology could be expected to produce fairly accurate microeconomic intuitions. Existing evidence supports this prediction.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 41 , 2018 , e171
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arkes, H. R. & Blumer, C. (1985) The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 35:124–40.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. (1968) Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy 76(2):169–217.Google Scholar
Caplan, B. (2008) The myth of the rational voter: Why democracies choose bad policies. (New edition, with a new preface by the author). Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Frederick, S., Novemsky, N., Wang, J., Dhar, R. & Nowlis, S. (2009) Opportunity cost neglect. Journal of Consumer Research 36:553–61.Google Scholar
Jern, A., Lucas, C. G. & Kemp, C. (2017) People learn other people's preferences through inverse decision making. Cognition 168:46–64.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979) Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47(2):263–92.Google Scholar
Kim, H., Schnall, S., Yi, D.-J. & White, M. P. (2013) Social distance decreases responders' sensitivity to fairness in the Ultimatum Game. Judgment and Decision Making 8(5):632–38.Google Scholar
Mazar, N., Amir, O. & Ariely, D. (2008) The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self-concept maintenance. Journal of Marketing Research 45(6):633–44.Google Scholar
McFadden, D. (1974) Conditional logit analysis of qualitative choice behavior. In Frontiers in econometrics, ed. Zarembka, P., pp. 105–42. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Thaler, R. H. (1988) Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 2(4):195–206.Google Scholar
Thaler, R. H. (1999) Mental accounting matters. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 12(3):183–206.Google Scholar
Train, K. (2009) Discrete choice models with simulation, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trope, Y. & Liberman, N. (2010) Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review 117(2):440–63.Google Scholar