On the absence of priority fights within economics, cheap talk, and the Walras-Jevons correspondence

Regis Deloche ()

Revue d'économie politique, 2012, vol. 122, issue 4, 585-598

Abstract: According to Merton [1957], the history of science is punctuated by disputes over priority of discovery, but there are no such priority fights in economics. Hands [2006] explains this phenomenon by assuming that economists have no sense of collective moral outrage. We provide a counterexample to this thesis by developing a gametheoretic analysis of the Walras-Jevons correspondence. We show that one-way preplay communication helped them to coordinate on a pure strategy Nash equilibrium of a ?battle of the sexes game?. Walras recognized Jevons as the inventor of the ?theory of exchange?. It was good for the promotion of mathematical economics.

Keywords: Aumann's conjecture; Jevons; Walras; cheap talk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=REDP_224_0585 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2012-4-page-585.htm (text/html)
free

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:cai:repdal:redp_224_0585

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue d'économie politique from Dalloz
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().