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Showing posts from January, 2018

A program for cognitive economics

I’m visiting the American Economics Association conference in Philadelphia this weekend and looking forward to catching up with the latest in theoretical and empirical research. Behavioural economics has received another endorsement this year with Richard Thaler’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. The behavioural field still has only a small minority of the conference’s papers, but many more than a few years ago. It finally feels like an accepted part of the broader field. Echoes of a new discipline have started to emerge. Miles Kimball published a detailed NBER working paper in 2015 that defined cognitive economics as “the economics of what is in people’s minds”. Before that, a book and conference in 2004 discussed the topic, and a few others (including Marco Novarese and myself,  here  and here ) have discussed it in the meantime. It seems that the term has been invented more than once in parallel - the term is after all a natural counterpart to "behavioural" economi