• Ockham’s Razor

    Updated: 2012-06-23 06:52:06
    | Peter Klein | This looks like a mighty interesting conference: Scientific theory choice is guided by judgments of simplicity, a bias frequently referred to as “Ockham’s Razor”. But what is simplicity and how, if at all, does it help science find the truth? Should we view simple theories as means for obtaining accurate predictions, [...]

  • Today’s Mini-Rant

    Updated: 2012-06-21 21:51:10
    | Peter Klein | From my colleague John Howe. Here’s the news item: MarketWatch (June 20, Orol), meanwhile, has learned that “regulatory observers urged policy makers on Wednesday to require companies to make road-show discussions available to the broader public.” Among them was Ann Sherman, associate professor of finance at DePaul University. She spoke at [...]

  • What Is a Firm?

    Updated: 2012-06-17 17:58:02
    | Peter Klein | Some of you have heard me suggest — at least half seriously — that we ban the word “entrepreneurship” from scientific discourse. The word has so many definitions that its use often obfuscates rather than clarifies. (If you mean self-employment, better to say say “self-employment”; if you mean opportunity discovery, say [...]

  • ISNIE 2012

    Updated: 2012-06-14 12:19:50
    | Peter Klein | The 16th annual meeting of the International Society for New Institutional Economics starts today at the USC Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California. President-Elect Lee Epstein has put together a very interesting program with the usual set of good papers and keynotes, including two special sessions in [...]

  • Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012)

    Updated: 2012-06-14 00:44:15
    | Peter Klein | A guest post from former guest blogger Joe Mahoney, the Caterpillar Chair in Business and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Business Administration, University of Illinois: As many readers of O&M know by now, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University (born August 7, 1933) died of pancreatic cancer on Tuesday, June [...]

  • Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Vol. 7: Business Cycles

    Updated: 2012-06-13 09:57:44
    | Nicolai Foss | The University of Chicago Press has just published the seventh volume, “Business Cycles, Part I and II,” in their nineteen volumes Collected Works of F.A. Hayek project. The two books contain most of Hayek’s well-known interwar work on the business cycle, particularly his more methodological Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (originally published [...]

  • Zero (Human) Intelligence Traders on Sex Markets

    Updated: 2012-06-12 20:03:54
    | Nicolai Foss | Here. Filed under: Ephemera

  • Interview with Gary Becker on Rational Choice

    Updated: 2012-06-11 15:30:06
    | Peter Klein | The latest issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics features an interview with Gary Becker on rational choice. I am not a Chicagoite positivist, but I sympathize with Gary’s overall take on the behavioral revolution: Meh. Interviewer: Following the crisis, many economists and methodologists have argued that more realistic [...]

  • Alien, Deconstructed

    Updated: 2012-06-06 21:52:43
    | Peter Klein | We haven’t raised the pomo periscope for a while, so here goes. I’m a big fan of the original Alien film and, like Ridley Scott fans around the world, am eagerly awaiting the prequellish Prometheus. Until seeing Tom Shone’s piece in Slate, however, I had no idea the Alien franchise had [...]

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