Andreas Ortmann

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James Ahiakpor has published a series of challenging articles in the leading history of economics journals and elsewhere in which he presents a critique of the monetary analysis of many leading authors, and especially of John Maynard Keynes and some of his most significant interpreters. In this book he integrates and develops this analysis into a comprehensive account of monetary macroeconomics. The book opens with the leading classical and neoclassical economists. The relationship between the quantity of money, ...

Abstract 1. Voices skepticism regarding the value of the distinction between the 2 forms of rationality (impersonal and personal rationality) as described by J. St. BT Evans and DE Over (1997). The authors suggest that experience and hypothetical thinking seem to be inadequate criteria for distinguishing decisions that require informal vs formal rationality.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

We discuss four key variables of experimental design that tend to be realized quite differentlyin economics and in areas of psychology relevant to both economists and psychologists, suchas judgment and decision making. On theoretical and empirical grounds, we argue that thesedifferent realizations, which concern enactment of scripts, repetition of trials, performancebasedmonetary payments, and the use of deception, are bound to

Abstract: In this paper, we reproduce Engel's (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments using his data, and then replicate it using our own data. We find that Engel's (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments is quite robust. We show that meta-analyses of dictator game experiments depend to an extent on the definition of independent variables and consistent coding of studies. This insight pertains in particular to the take-option, which has produced important questions (Bardsley 2008; List 2007; Guala and Mittone 2010) ...

ABSTRACT We discuss four major classes of coordination problems: pure coordination or rendezvous games; Pareto-ranked coordination games such as stag hunt and order-statistic games; mixed-motives coordination games such as “Battle of the Sexes”; and critical-mass games. We review “classic” implementations of exemplars of the four classes of coordination problems. En passant, we discuss experimental practices in economics. We conclude with an assessment of the literature: we discuss what we have learned so far from the literature ...

Money, lies, and replicability: On the need for empirically grounded experimental practices and interdisciplinary discourse Ralph Hertwig & Andreas Ortmann* Authors ’ response (to the commentaries on “Experimental practices in economics: A methodological challenge for psychologists?”) This response reinforces the major themes of our target article. The impact of key methodological variables should not be taken for granted. Rather, experimental practices should be grounded in the empirical evidence. If no evidence is available, decisions on design and implementation should be subjected to systematic experimentation. In other words, we argue against empirically blind conventions and against methodological choices based on unreflected beliefs, habits or rituals. Our approach will neither inhibit methodological diversity nor constrain experimental creativity. More likely, it will promote both goals.

How do we make decisions? According to subjective expected utility (SEU) theory, which still holds sway throughout much of the social sciences, “decision makers behave as if utilities were assigned to outcomes, probabilities were attached states of nature, and decisions were made by taking expected utilities ” (Mas-Collel, Whinston, & Green, 1995, p. 206). Although this is an elegant and often useful way to model decision outcomes, it imposes heroic knowledge and rationality requirements, and it clearly does not reflect the way people make decisions most of the time. 1 Herbert Simon (1956) was the most outspoken critic of the assumption that SEU theory can be applied in any literal way to human choices. In his view, “the SEU model is a beautiful object deserving a prominent place in Plato’s heaven of ideas ” (1990a, p. 194); real humans, however, “have neither the facts nor the consistent structure of values nor the reasoning power at their disposal that would be required... to appl...

We test empirically the strategic counterpart of the ADM (Adaptive Decision Maker) hypothesis (Payne et al., 1993), which states that decision makers adapt to increasing time pressure in predictable ways both in information search and choice behavior. We find our conjecture that tightening time constraints in a strategic context similarly affects players confirmed. Specifically, our subjects are more likely to ignore others' payoffs, thus transforming games effectively into non-strategic decision situations. At least for our selection of strategic interactions this behavior is adaptive in the sense that there were no significant payoff losses resulting from the change in behavior. We use Bayesian latent class modeling to estimate the frequency of heuristic use or types in the subject pool conditional on time constraints. Under time pressure, we observe an increase in the proportion of non-strategic types (particularly Level-1) at the cost of other strategic heuristics including ...

ABSTRACT Analyzing the rhetorical structure of The Wealth of Nations (Smith WN) and its context, we make the case for the central importance of its Book V, "Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth”, which tends to be neglected in most accounts of Smith’s oeuvre (even, most recently, Phillipson 2010; see Ortmann & Walraevens 2014) but which in our reading is, rather than a general treatise on optimal taxation and spending, a book focused on the future of an empire being threatened by a Mercantilist system. The Empire in question was, of course, the British one. Book V follows Book IV, in which Smith -- after having documented the slow and unnatural progress of opulence in, among others, England and Scotland in Book III – had undertaken a “very violent attack” (Smith EPS p. 208; Smith Corr., p. 251) on those responsible for the low growth rates (“opulence”) in Scotland and, even more, England: manufacturers and merchants and those politicians who propagated Mercantilist philosophies and practices of the commercial class. Aware that those he targeted would not take kindly to the attack, Smith made his case against the Mercantilist system as well as its colonial policy by marshaling his earlier insights into rhetorical theory and practice. We explain why and how he organized his attack.

ABSTRACT We study how donors decide which charity to give to. To this end, we construct a theoretical model that clarifies the conditions in which the stand-alone benefit from giving, price of giving, and cost of information acquisition inform giving decisions. The model shows that giving decisions are affected by a price-cost trade-off – a condition where donors care about the price of giving because they want their donations to maximise charitable output, but dislike searching for the price of giving because it is costly. The literature is then reviewed to test the explanatory power of the theoretical model: it seems to support the conjecture that a price-cost trade-off informs donors’ giving decisions.

ABSTRACT We discuss ways to cope with uneven expected lab earnings that are the likely results of role assignments. We identify three problems associated with uneven earnings in the lab: of social preferences, of low marginal return for effort, and of perceived deception. Mining the opinions of respondents from the Economic Science Association’s (ESA) discussion list, the literature, and drawing on our own experience, we present five responses experimenters can use to mitigate the three problems. We discuss the merits and drawbacks of each strategy.