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A

25.04.2019
Before I deal with the question of how to connect internal and external evolutionary mechanisms, I want to show that evolutionary thinking is already emerging in current neuroeconomics. This relates to the strand of research that builds on neural networks to explain choice. The standard approach in neuroeconomics starts out from the idea of a... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

E

15.04.2019
To my best knowledge, neuroeconomists never refer to Friedrich Hayek as founder of their discipline. But he should be included at least in the list of the most important intellectual progenitors. His 1952 book ‘The Sensory Order’ is a highly abstract philosophy of the brain, came surprisingly close to Hebb’s emerging paradigm of connectionism, and... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

T

01.04.2019
In the recently published ‘Festschrift’ for Karl-Heinz Brodbeck I have a paper (in German) that argues in favour of an ‘Aristotelian Oath’ in finance. This goes back to the insights gained by our INSOSCI project. The core idea is that agency in the financial sector manifests a collectively shared identity. Hence, resolving certain problems of... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

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14.03.2019
At the INSOSCI book symposium we discussed various suggestions for the title of our volume of collected papers that will be published by Routledge. We ended up with: ‘Social Neuroeconomics: The Integration of the Neurosciences and the Social Sciences’. So, what is Social Neuroeconomics? There is already an occasional use in the literature of that... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

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15.02.2019
A couple of days ago, we successfully finished our capstone INSOSCI book symposium bringing together neuroscientists, philosophers, economists and social scientists to discuss what emerged as the core topical concern: social neuroeconomics, the integration of the neurosciences and the social sciences under the auspices of economics. In my own contribution, I introduced the argument that... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

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14.02.2019
Multidisciplinary terminology in herding research In this project, we are recurrently confronted with the fact that multidisciplinary research always has to cope with discipline-specific terminology. For example, Banerjee (1992) introduced a sequential decision model for herding behavior. In order to visualize his model, he developed a thought experiment involving a queue of persons in front... READ MORE
Authors
Prof. Dr. Martina Piefke
Marie Christin Bobe
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

L

07.02.2019
Recently, a young philosopher, Kathi Beier, presented a paper on the virtue ethics of Aristoteles and Thomas at the Max Weber Centre, my institution. That was very inspiring against the backdrop of the current foundational debates that I discussed in previous blogs. I think that reflecting on Aristotle can even provide insight for modern neuroscience... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

K

05.02.2019
‚Krambambuli‘ is the title of a short story by the famous 19thcentury Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach which describes the deep emotional relationship between a dog and its master, a ranger in charge of the forests of a local noble. When I listened to it on a long commute recently, this story taught me lessons... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

A

23.01.2019
In philosophy of mind (and many psychologists and neuroscientists might agree) there is the idea that one of the hardest problems is to handle the phenomenon of consciousness and of first-person experience. That is a legacy of Descartes: First-person experience is often presented as the most authentic and safe form of knowledge, while at the... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

W

19.01.2019
In my youth I learned classical guitar. I gave up during student times and did not touch the instrument for forty years. In late 2017, I decided that this cannot be! I took up practising again, with astounding success, as measured against my own expectations. Obviously, what I had Iearnt many years ago was somehow... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

T

09.01.2019
Almost forty years ago, I read a book in which two papers by the eminent linguist Roman Jakobson were included. One paper reported about interviews with Albert Einstein that had been conducted by Max Wertheimer. Einstein said that his thinking was primarily in non-verbal ways, especially in the stage of generating new ideas. He even... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

T

07.01.2019
After a long break, now I am back with the blog: Happy New Year! INSOSCI is looking forward to holding our final book symposium on February 12 and 13 at Witten/Herdecke University, with renowned international researchers in the field joining the INSOSCI team and contributing chapters to a book devoted to the ‘social brain’, mainly... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2019

S

29.09.2018
Yesterday I spent some time waiting at the clinic, and so I read a few more articles in the ‘Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance’ on my smartphone. I was struck by a revelation that occurred when I combined two contributions by Swedberg and Hardie & MacKenzie, leading scholars in the field. Swedberg has... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

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23.09.2018
The capstone event of the INSOSCI project will be a book symposium on the social brain, to be held at February 12-13 2019 at Witten Herdecke University. What does the term ‘social brain’ mean when dealing with financial markets, in disciplinary terms? I think it implies a strong role of sociology. And indeed, there is... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

T

04.08.2018
One of the most interesting empirical data about behaviour towards risk comes from sociological and anthropological research on financial trading, as aptly summarized by the chapters by Preda and Zaloom in the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. This information allows for a phenomenology of risk taking in an almost laboratory environment. There are... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

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31.07.2018
The central argument in Beckert’s book (see previous blog post) is that modern capitalism systematically generates uncertainty, and even builds on uncertainty as opportunity, and that people deal with this uncertainty by means of creating, mobilizing and relying on fictions in order to be able to act in a reasonable way. I add the term... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

R

26.07.2018
Summer time gives you the opportunity to read good books. I am now reading Jens Beckert’s new book . I will present some thoughts on it in following blogs. Now I wish to concentrate on one fundamental point that is not specific to this book. Beckert’s book is about the role of time and expectations... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

E

25.06.2018
Decision-theoretic models prescribe how an agent should behave in order to act rationally. But we know both from quotidian phenomena, as well as from the experimental study of behaviour, that human agents diverge from decision-theoretic norms across a wide range of contexts. Divergence from these norms can be more or less severe. Certain cases are... READ MORE
Authors
Dr. Susanne Maria Uusitalo
Dr. Andrew Sims
Categories
Tampere | Louvain-La-Neuve | General | 2018

W

12.06.2018
At my institution, the Max Weber Centre, a young sociologist is sojourning as a Fellow, Gabriel Abend. He has extremely stimulating work on the concept of ‘decision’ in modern societies, social sciences and philosophy. In a recent paper, he gives us much food for thought, and I think that his views are very relevant for... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

T

05.06.2018
Today I come back on my last post on the paper by Alós-Ferrer that is an excellent overview of what we know about the social brain. In a nutshell, the social brain hypothesis means that one cannot causally reduce human behaviour to internal neurophysiological determinants, but always needs to refer to external causal factors. However,... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

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11.05.2018
Today, I continue with my posts on two contributions in the new issue of the Journal of Economic Literature. This is about the contribution by Carlos Alós-Ferrer, who emerged as one of the intellectual leaders in the field of economics, psychology and neuroscience in recent years. He is now professor at one of the central... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

C

27.04.2018
One of celebrated results from philosophical thinking about ethics is that we should not succumb to the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, i.e. infer ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Recently, it became fashionable to ground ethics on neurosciences. That is mostly justified by avoiding another fallacy, that one should avoid imposing ‘ought’ on actions which one cannot achieve for binding... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

M

04.04.2018
In the new issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives there is a paper that overviews and evaluates the literature that aims at explaining why so many people seem to leave money on the table. Well, as the famous joke about economists tells us, they might be hyperrational and just think that somebody would have... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

T

26.03.2018
My first publication related to the brain was an elaboration on Hayek’s Sensory Order in 1992. In this paper, I argued that Hayek’s argument closely resembles Edelman’s Neuronal Darwinism. If one can believe Wikipedia (entry: “Neural Darwinism”), I was the first economist who noticed this. Yet, Edelman himself recognized Hayek’s early contribution (there is a... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

M

19.03.2018
In a recent communication, Don Ross pointed out that the discussion on mechanistic explanations in the neurosciences mostly identifies with reductionistic explanations, and that my proposal to build an integration with sociology is new. This matches with his ‘modular’ approach to neuroeconomics which aims at grounding neuroeconomics on an externalist philosophy of mind. As I... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

A

16.03.2018
In one of my recent INSOSCI working papers, I argued that a functional view should take the place of an essentialist understanding of dual systems. I think this principle is foundational for approaching the brain in terms of constitutive explanations. I want to illustrate this with what I regard as one of the most important... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

O

22.02.2018
Recently, I was silent on the blog because I was very busy with completing my new book manuscript ‘Fundamentals of Critical Economics’ (in German: Grundlegung einer kritischen Theorie der Wirtschaft, publisher: Metropolis). Depending on your perspective, this weighty volume of 620 pages is a courageous or lunatic attempt at changing economics from the bottom up.... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

T

10.02.2018
I attended a fascinating talk yesterday on “Behavioral Economics and the Problem of the Rational Inner Self” by Mantas Radzvilas at the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mantas reconstructed what he considers the main theoretical approach in current behavioral economics,... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Jens Harbecke
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

D

07.02.2018
The ups and downs of the financial markets in these days draw attention to the increasing role of automatic trading, as in earlier episodes of this kind. The use of sophisticated proprietary software has become a major determinant of competitive advantage of fund managers. Many observers believe that this mitigates flaws of human behaviour because... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

A

22.01.2018
Last week, a workshop should have been held at Witten, however, it had to be cancelled because of the impact of ‘Friederike’ on German railways and air traffic. That was a pity, because we planned to discuss interesting topics. One is the PhD thesis by Johanna Jauernig at Technical University of Munich which applies economic... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

D

15.01.2018
The newspaper ‘The Economist’ every year publishes a double Christmas issue. This year a detailed article about women in economics is included. Women are underrepresented in academic economics, with only 15 percent of professors in the United States, for example. This seems to correspond to the general situation in the MINT disciplines, but the situation... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

I

04.01.2018
In the context of the INSOSCI Witten group, Lea Diederichsen is working on various case studies, one of which is herding on financial markets. She explores an interesting approach that transfers the ‘social intuitionist model’ in moral psychology to this field of research. In my view, it ideally converges with the framework of social psychology... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2018

C

20.12.2017
Neuroscience is a discipline that is grounded in very complicated, costly and highly intelligent empirical research in labs. You cannot be a neuroscientist without being socialized in the world of the lab, and without taking part in the stream of collaborative experimental work. This is rightly emphasized in textbooks of neuroscience, such as the widely... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

H

04.12.2017
Neuroscientists normally have scant interest for classical continental philosophy. If at all, they would study modern analytical philosophy, which in turn pays back with explicit consideration of neuroscience, as is evident in the INSOSCI methodological framework, the mechanistic approach. So, it came as a big surprise to me reading a paper by Marchetti and Koster... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

I

25.11.2017
Currently I am checking neuroscience textbooks about their way how to tackle fundamental issues such as consciousness. One widely used textbook on cognitive neuroscience is subtitled ‘The Biology of Mind’ and written by Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mangun. Gazzaniga is a leading neuroscientist, and among his different contributions, the notion of ‘interpreter’ looms large in our... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

K

20.11.2017
The problem of akrasia, the weakness of the will, is mostly discussed as a problem of control, in many variants. For example, the theory of hyperbolic time preferences suggests that there are preference reversals against we cannot resist, such as preferring a smaller reward that is near to us over a larger reward that is... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

O

12.11.2017
Science entertains an awkward relationship with language, since it seems to be an imperfect and often even delusory medium of depicting reality. This is also true for behavioural economics and psychology, as I have pointed out in earlier blog posts: Narratives distort memory, linguistic descriptions create frames that distort the perception of probabilities, and so... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

T

29.10.2017
Readers of my blog posts may feel tired about my recurrent blasts against the dual systems approach. But I think that this is a necessary effort, given the strong impact of these models on behavioural economics and, ultimately, on policies based on this. The problem is not just one of methodology and descriptive and explanatory... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

T

23.10.2017
Currently I am working on an INSOSCI paper about the methodological problem of dual systems or dual process approaches. If you look at what protagonists of those models write about their validity, one notices extreme care. For example, in their introductory article to the ‘Journal of Economic Psychology’ special issue (Vol. 41, 2014) on the... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

A

22.10.2017
There are undismissable philosophical questions- ‘Do we have free will? is one of them- that require clear, well supported, soundly reasoned answers. We should not be bought off with allusive, impressionistic answers, however appealing or moving they may be. (Dennett, 2013, p.45)   The discussions on the problem of free will are mostly focused on... READ MORE
Author
Anna Drozdzewska
Categories
Louvain-La-Neuve | General | 2017

R

14.10.2017
Receiving the news that Richard Thaler received the Nobel award in economics was great satisfaction to me. Reflecting upon the history of Nobel awards, there is a consistent tendency to choose economists with strong cross-disciplinary leanings, often alternating with economists who focus on the more mainstream mathematical models (such as last year, Hart and Bengstroem).... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

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10.10.2017
In my library I have several psychology books published in the 1970s by publishers of the German Democratic Republic and their Western partner publishers. Born in the GDR, with relatives there, my family paid regular visits and had to exchange D-Mark, with few uses of the GDR currency obtained. As a youthful book aficionado, I... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

R

30.08.2017
Back from family vacations, I return to the INSOSCI blog with a contribution on Kant. During vacations, I have the habit to read books that I always wished to read, but never could manage, mostly because of their size and significance. Kant’s ‘Critiques’ belonged to this type of books, and I managed to read the... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

T

02.08.2017
The famous metaphor of ‚bulls‘ and ‚bears’ reflects the idea that many people have, namely that markets have ‘moods’. That means, there are collectively shared emotional states of market actors. This raises the question how these states relate with individual emotions. That could be very important for understanding the mechanisms underlying phenomena such as herding.... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

H

30.07.2017
A few weeks ago and within the “Digitaler Salon” debating series at Witten/Herdecke University organized by my colleague Gabriele Gramelsberger, I had the opportunity to get a brief insight into the work of https://illuminoo.com/ , a company whose goal is to develop external replicas of people’s psychological lives. Or in their own words, they want... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Jens Harbecke
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

A

25.07.2017
In my earlier blog post on herding I pointed out that the literature has introduced the notion of altruism as a possible means to cope with the inefficiencies that result from negative information externalities. That means, if a person has private information that contradicts market opinion, herding is individually rational, thus contributing to collective failure.... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

T

06.07.2017
As a permanent fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, I enjoy many opportunities to listen fascinating lectures and talks. This week, Postdoc Roman Madzia presented a paper on ‘Care of the S: The Dynamics of Mind between Social Conflicts and the Dialogicality of the Self’. ‘Care of the S’... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

O

29.06.2017
The INSOSCI meeting in mid-June provoked a discussion on the feasibility of access to health care services for addicted individuals and here I wish to explore the grounds a little further. In the INSOSCI project, I am particularly interested in gambling and its pathological forms, but the ethical discussion about health care services below is... READ MORE
Author
Dr. Susanne Maria Uusitalo
Categories
Tampere | General | 2017

D

26.06.2017
The INSOCSI partners from Belgium are mostly concerned about the implications of the neurosciences for ‘free will’. This is a question that is not only of philosophical importance, but also of highest practical significance. If addiction counts as a disease that is neurophysiologically grounded, we do not have a choice and can be treated as... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

A

20.06.2017
After completing my previous blog, I did my daily exercises, and suddenly my brain came up with an idea how to resolve the dual systems issue. Indeed, Strack and Deutsch clearly recognize that the two systems closely interact, in both directions. Perhaps my movements made my reflective system become creative? If so, I wonder which... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

R

19.06.2017
After returning from Kasnäs, I delved into the literature recommended by Professor Wiers (see my previous blog entry). A central point is the distinction between the two processes or systems (unfortunately, the literature often tends to use the two terms interchangeably, although I think there are fundamental differences between ‘process’ and ‘system’ in ontological terms).... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

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15.06.2017
Have you ever heard of Kasnäs? If you are a Fin, certainly yes, as it is a wonderful place to be at the Finish coast, a two-hour drive from Helsinki. This is where the meeting of the INSOSCI consortium was organized by our Finish members. These were highly inspiring and productive days! Keynote speakers were... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

M

06.06.2017
One of the strangest aspects of Kahneman’s theory about human decision making is the idea that memory is systematically distorting our view of reality. This is the distinction between ‘experienced utility’ and ‘decision utility’. There are different versions of it, one is that in remembering experiences, we do not care for the duration, but only... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

P

29.05.2017
My favourite philosopher of neuroeconomics, Don Ross, just published a paper together with his friend and collaborator, the econometrician Glenn Harrison, in which they present what I think is a conclusive critique of prospect theory. I sketch the argument and add my own thoughts that even strengthen the case. The first point is that prospect... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

T

22.05.2017
This week, the newspaper The Economist features an article about “When nudge comes to shove”, charting the career of behavioural economics in policy making. A growing number of countries employs specialist task forces and even agencies that design policies by relying on behavioural economics insights. This development is dubbed ‘libertarian paternalism’ and is often criticized... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

D

19.05.2017
In the April 2017 issue of the American Economic Review we find a fascinating paper by Hassan and Mertens “The Social Cost of Near-Rational Investment”. I think it deserves close attention for our work of clarifying methodological issues in Behavioural Finance. The paper uses a standard Real Business Cycle and Rational Expectations Model to gauge... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

T

13.05.2017
About two decades ago, the notion of the ‘social brain’ emerged as an analytic paradigm in some fields of the brain sciences. The general idea is that the human brain evolved under selective pressures that favoured cooperation. Hence, if we want to understand human decision making and behaviour, we always need to consider how they... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

A

27.04.2017
The term ‘animal spirits’ originates from Keynes‘ famous ‘Chapter Twelve’ in his General Theory and plays an important role in understanding the ‘state of long term expectations’. My impression is that most economists use this term in a biased way, suggesting irrationality, and hence convey a negative bias in the meaning. However, Keynes’ original statement... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

S

26.04.2017
One of the fundamental methodological issues in research on human behaviour is whether we should take rationality as a norm. This is not the same as studying rationality, such as in game theory. It is about whether rationality should be a tool of measurement to identify causal mechanisms that in fact guide human behaviour. A... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

B

18.04.2017
In the recent issue of the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL LV, 1, 96ff), Golman, Hagmann and Loewenstein have a fascinating piece on ‘information avoidance’. They conclude: “Given the important consequences of information avoidance, however, research on the mechanisms that produce it could have immediate and important policy applications (…).” Indeed, the paper is a... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

T

08.04.2017
In my recent blog posts, I referred to ‘narratives’ frequently, and it happens that the new AER issue of April 2017 contains Robert Shiller’s Presidential Address that is entitled ‘Narrative Economics’! And indeed, his examples mostly refer to historical events that involve a lot of coordinated behaviour in large groups, namely depressions and crises. His... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

E

03.04.2017
Recently, when I delivered the Fei Xiaotong lecture to the department of sociology and anthropology at Tsinghua University, I met an American postdoc in economic anthropology, Megan Steffen. She has an extremely interesting draft paper on the real estate market in Zhengzhou, Henan province. When I visited Zhengzhou two years ago, some of my Beijing... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

H

29.03.2017
Herding is an important topic. I just read the ‚Schumpeter’ column of The Economist, March 25th, 2017, about current conditions of America’s shale industry, which is “testament to Texan grit”. The industry is deeply mired in debt, and struggles to regain profitability at the prevailing low prices of oil. In 34 of recent 40 quarters,... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

H

24.03.2017
I am currently working on writing a review of the current state of research on the determinants of herding. The study of herding in the financial market is conducted not only by economists but also by psychologists and behavioral economists. The different disciplines use varying methodologies and (as a consequence) diverse operationalizations of herding. My... READ MORE
Author
Marie Christin Bobe
Categories
Witten | General | 2017

W

23.03.2017
What is a ‚mechanistic explanation‘? In my experience, many people tend to misunderstand this in terms of a ‘mechanical explanation’ especially when knowing that a mechanistical explanation should establish causal claims. So, is this a revival of 18th century mechanical thinking? Surely, not. In my work on philosophical aspects of neuroeconomics, I submit strong non-reductionist... READ MORE
Author
Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Categories
Witten | General | 2017
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