The effects of Procedures on Social Interaction: A Literature Review

Vanessa Mertins

No 200806, IAAEG Discussion Papers until 2011 from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU)

Abstract: While economists have neglected procedures for a long time, other social scientists early established a substantial research program. By now, there exists a large gap between a sheer bulk of empirical, experimental, and theoretical studies by non-economists and the fact that there is hardly any economic research on procedures. We argue that due to clear evidence for procedures in uencing human decision-making, economists can not remain silent about procedural aspects of strategic interactions any longer. There is an important research agenda to be developed. This survey article is intended to discuss an important approach by which the standard economic model, which is based on consequentialist preferences, needs to be enriched: not only outcomes shape human behavior but also the way in which decisions are taken. Behavioral economics may serve as an important link. Its aim is to integrate insights of cognitive and social psychologists as well as experimental economists with neoclassical economic theory. We argue that experimental economics should increase its efforts to identify procedural effects and that these experiments should be more incorporated in the theoretical literature as part of an ongoing dialogue between theorists and experimentalists. Among procedural aspects, procedural fairness suggests itself to become an integrative part. To highlight the need for rethinking the standard economic approach we review social science literature on procedural effects, with a special focus on experimental economics and inspired theory-building.

Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hpe and nep-net
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaaeg.de/images/DiscussionPaper/2008_06.pdf Revised version, 2008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iaa:wpaper:200806

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAAEG Discussion Papers until 2011 from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adrian Chadi ().