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The tragedy of the commons refers to the overuse of resources which are rival in consumption but lack excludability and it also refers to rent dissipation. While the tragedy of the anticommons is a tragedy closely connected with underuse of resources that are rival in consumption and with too strong excludability. The prior studies proved that the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons are symmetric from the perspective of pure mathematics, especially the game theory, which was later refuted by behavioral economics experiments. According to them, the tragedy of the anticommons is severer than the tragedy of the commons. The asymmetry of the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons is a paradox by these different research methods. This paradox shows that there are imperfections in the completely rational economic man hypothesis set up by neoclassical economics. As a fundamental theory, the tragedy of the commons is quite influential in many disciplines, such as microeconomics, public sector economics, ecological economics, environmental economics, management, sociology, property law, and political science. And the tragedy of the anticommons theory has also opened its door of both theoretical research and practical implications since its acceptance by Nobel laureate Buchanan, the main founder of public choice school. Only when theoretical issues are thoroughly discussed and made clear enough, can people avoid misunderstanding or misusing the commons theory. Thus, it is necessary to elucidate the paradox between them. Based on Simon’s bounded rationality, Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory, value function, Thaler’s mental accounting, endowment effect, and other cognitive psychological tools, this study clearly shows that agents’ decision-making process is not just based on the long-believed marginal benefit and marginal cost analysis advocated by traditional neoclassical economists. Agents’ decision-making is a process in which agents selectively absorb, code the objective marginal revenue and marginal cost, and feed relevant information to their brain. Therefore, what plays a directly decisive role is not the objective marginal revenue and marginal cost per se, but the mentally perceived subjective utility of marginal revenue and marginal cost by the human brain. Followed by this research clue, the paradox between the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons is elucidated from the perspective of cognitive psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Is mainstream economics only about growth, efficiency, and sustainability? Many critics contend so, but the recent state of the art in economics suggests not. Respectively drawing on reformist neoclassical economics, neoclassical microeconomics "proper," and behavioral economics, major studies show that mainstream economics provides theories of inequality and unsustainability. However, the theories of causation utilized remain largely neoclassical. Similarly, the bases for repairing the harms are grounded in neoclassical reasoning, while the mechanisms for restoration—ranging from minimalist interventions and income and substitution effects to behavioral nudges—are still mainstream. Fundamentally, they say little or nothing substantial about ecological imperialism, at the heart of which are rent theft and ecological debt, two critical cornerstones of world ecological crises. Therefore, mainstream economists certainly have, use, and apply theories of inequality and unsustainability, but mainstream economists neither have, use, nor apply transformative theories of social stratification, nor ecological imperialism generally. The overall effect of this disconnect from real‐world ecological crises is not simply that conventional environmental policies are incomplete, but that mainstream economics and conventional policies deflect attention from ecological imperialism behind veils of rhetoric, prices, and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Behavioral Economics poses an important question: does it substitute or complement Neoclassical Economics? This article makes an analysis to identify how the substitution-complementarity issue is highly sensitive to the epistemic context. In particular, the paper distinguishes four epistemological contexts: descriptive, explicative, predictive, and prescriptive. The idea that the behavioral substitute the neoclassical approach in descriptive and explicative contexts is defended; however, there is a complementarity in the predictive and prescriptive contexts, where there are some domains in which the neoclassical approach might still work well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on neoclassical economic theory and the realities of individual decision-making described by behavioral economics to begin to grapple with the complex problem and people enroll in health insurance policies. It mentions repeal will have a negative impact on the insurance markets and negative implications of decreased health insurance enrollment, beyond just the instability that healthy people leaving insurance markets will cause.

The contractual relationship between author and intermediary--be it a producer, publisher, or anyone facilitating the commercial exploitation of the author's copyrighted works--is often viewed as an unequal one. Other than a minority of superstars, the vast majority of authors are forced to accept contractual terms dictated by their powerful counterparties. This outcome is perceived by many scholars and policymakers as undesirable. Thus, in an effort to protect the authors' wellbeing in their contractual dealings, legislatures from around the world are increasingly keen to adopt regulatory measures that limit the menu of options the parties can adopt contractually. Specifically, these instruments endeavor to offset author's weak bargaining position either by ensuring a minimum level of remuneration to authors' ex-ante or providing them with an inalienable right to ask for a modification of the com-sensation stipulated in the contract ex-post or by granting them an inalienable right to regain control of their previously transferred rights. Overall, these legislative interventions are seemingly based on the assumption that regulating author-intermediary transactions ex ante and ex post will invariably improve the financial situation of authors as a whole. This assumption is mistaken. Drawing on insights from neoclassical and behavioral economics, the benefits and drawbacks of these interventions are narrated throughout this paper. It is further demonstrated that while these legislative interventions were adopted with the best possible intentions, they ultimately prove ineffective in meeting their own objective of securing authors a more favorable distribution of wealth. In fact, they occasionally harm the very group of beneficiaries they were designed to help. Particularly, the different forms of interventions into the author-intermediary contractual relationships create an inter-author redistribution of wealth and redistribution over time, which largely harm the most vulnerable groups of authors. These findings illustrate the limitations of the current legislative interventions that were designed to strengthen the position of authors vis-àvis their counterparties and emphasize that the structural disparities in bargaining powers cannot be easily remedied by legal intervention alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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"Behavioral economics" attempts to incorporate insights from other social sciences, especially psychology, in order to enrich the standard economic model. The interest in the psychology of human behavior returns economics to its earliest roots. Adam Smith talked about such key concepts as loss aversion, overconfidence and self-control. Nevertheless, the modern version of behavioral economics introduced in the 1980s met with resistance by some economists, who preferred to retain the standard neo-classical model. They introduced several arguments for why psychology could safely be ignored. In this essay I show that these arguments have been rejected, both theoretically and empirically, so it is time to move on. The new approach should include two different kinds of theories: normative models that characterize the optimal solution to specific problems and descriptive models that capture how humans actually behave. The latter theories will incorporate some variables I call supposedly irrelevant factors, which can improve the explanatory power of economic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use playing time in the National Basketball Association to investigate whether sunk costs affect decision making. Behavioral economics implies that teams favor players chosen in the lottery and first round of the draft because of the greater financial and psychic commitment to them. Neoclassical economics implies that only current performance matters. We build on previous work in two ways. First, we better capture potential playing time by accounting for time lost to injuries or suspension. Second, we use regression discontinuity to capture changes when a player's draft position crosses thresholds. We find that teams allocate no more time to highly drafted players. ( JEL L83, J23, D03) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the development of the field of economic methodology during the last few decades emphasizing the early influence of the "shelf" of Popperian philosophy and the division between neoclassical and heterodox economics. It argues that the field of methodology has recently adopted a more naturalistic approach focusing primarily on the "new pluralist" subfields of experimental economics, behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, and related subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]