送交者: mangolasi 于 2006-4-27, 12:42:38:
回答: So are you saying there is not much new stuff in this so-called BF? 由 Latino2 于 2006-4-27, 11:43:45:
Philosophically it's good, since it's seeking the origin (especially if you are a reductionist or have an inclination to be one).
But I don't think there are lots of new things there. It's just psycology (as far as many papers I read).
In terms of contribution, I think BF/BE is on the stage of accumulating knowledge for the next revolution, which have yet come (sorry if you are not Kuhn's fan, neither do I. But I am just saying there might be some day comes to overturn the whole paradigm of current discipline of economics).
Personally I don't think BF/BE can be easily assimilated into the neo-classical framwork. It challenges the most basic assumption in economics--while the boldest things before are just challenging some 2nd step assumption, like the information etc.
While it is fundamentally conflicting with the current framework, it doesn't provide a new framework working as well as the current one, which provides more or less prediction power and the ability to adjust itself into new (within-framework) evidence. Basing on people are not rational, you can not derive anything from it--YET. Maybe a handful of genius can do that. Even how irrational they are is hard to measure and predict. While what makes economics, compared to other social "science", more or less rigorous is that we can give a rather precise meaning of every variable we put in the model, and measure it with some degree of accuracy.
In terms of methodology, I have problem on those "lab" condition, as what people faces in real world is so different from that in lab--contrary to what a computer faces in real world is not that different from that in lab. The "data" are so shaky. However, in terms of methodology, there are some progresses: people are using game show data, and I know some are in the "quasi-experiment" form, mainly in labor economy, where they have some small scale change of mechanism in the real world working condition, or observing some change in people's behavior after some change of law, which happens to give out a "clean" change.