BE is good for Ted Talks arousing young unexperienced scholars that are afraid of formalizations.Because coming up with clever rationalizations for why everything can be explained within the homo oeconomicus model, even though you'd be embarrassed to explain this theory in front of a non-economist.
homo oeconomicus -> strawman all BE love
BE is good for Ted Talks arousing young unexperienced scholars that are afraid of formalizations.this, is all it has ever been or ever will be. also a convenient way to justify policy priors.
The whole point of behavioral economics is to formalize insights from psychology that are not modeled appropriately with expected utility. Perhaps you should actually read the literature before you attempt to dismiss it.
Something that come to my mind
1. The Quest for Parsimony in Behavioral Economics: New Methods and Evidence on Three Fronts
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~jzinman/Papers/BE_Parsimony_2017_2.pdf
Correlations between various behavioral biases in a representative sample of the US population. Also see Camerer et al.'s Econographics.
2. Adverse Selection and Inertia in Health Insurance Markets: When Nudging Hurts
http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~bhandel/wp/Handel_ASIN_2013.pdf
How does behavioral bias interact with standard market imperfection, in this case adverse selection
3. Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20160425
How to model the well-known intuition that English auction is easier to understand than second price auction. Also, how one behavioral bias and one institutional constraint have the same solution
4. Taxing Humans: Pitfalls of the Mechanism Design Approach and Potential Resolutions
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1gasHTYImolSFlRR2RPaHpTQ1E
Similar in spirit to 3., behavioral bias makes details of implementation matter
5. Probabilistic States versus Multiple Certainties: The Obstacle of Uncertainty in Contingent Reasoning
https://sites.google.com/site/emanuelvespa/manuscript_nov10.pdf?attredirects=0
Why we really don't know much about uncertainty
What are the 5 best BE papers that were written in the past 5 years?
I think for BE to realise its potential two things must happen: 1] theorizing must improve (many theoretical stuff are just not rigorous, thought through etc. but some are, of course); 2] there needs to be more applied NON-BE papers that study important things empirically and show that a behavioural angle is essential to understand a particular problem. There are few recent examples of that in QJe and AER. Until BE is only done or pushed empirically by BE economists that "look for puzzles" to apply their theory/models it is not going to matter.
I think for BE to realise its potential two things must happen: 1] theorizing must improve (many theoretical stuff are just not rigorous, thought through etc. but some are, of course); 2] there needs to be more applied NON-BE papers that study important things empirically and show that a behavioural angle is essential to understand a particular problem. There are few recent examples of that in QJe and AER. Until BE is only done or pushed empirically by BE economists that "look for puzzles" to apply their theory/models it is not going to matter.
Re 1) for that to happen there are basically only two ways forward: Choquet expected utility and related approaches, and non-Bayesian decision theory, BE is more a critique of Bayesianism than it is of anything else, so wy need to move beyond Bayesian approaches, this will put us at odds of a lot of broader trends in the sciences, so that sort of agenda is going to be hard to push forward, and I don't think the Choquet approach is yet widely accepted, few attempts to test it experimentally for example (if any).
I don't think the Choquet approach is yet widely accepted, few attempts to test it experimentally for example (if any).
From 1994: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167268194901090 From the abstract: "Finally we found that CEU is not really superior to EU in predicting the participants' decisions"
Yep, that's essentially what Spiegler is saying, at least #1
I think for BE to realise its potential two things must happen: 1] theorizing must improve (many theoretical stuff are just not rigorous, thought through etc. but some are, of course); 2] there needs to be more applied NON-BE papers that study important things empirically and show that a behavioural angle is essential to understand a particular problem. There are few recent examples of that in QJe and AER. Until BE is only done or pushed empirically by BE economists that "look for puzzles" to apply their theory/models it is not going to matter.