A rich vein for historians and methodologists of recent economics to mine

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Notes on contributor

Kyu Sang Lee is a professor of economics at Ajou University in Korea. He is currently translating the second edition of Lionel Robbins’ An Essay on the Nature & Significance of Economic Science into Korean. His research interests include the history of (micro)economics in the twentieth century and thereafter, and the relationship between Western economic thoughts & policies and Korean economic thoughts & policies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 After telling this story, one may attempt to shed light on the research activities that members of the MacArthur Research Network on Preferences have engaged in since the second half of the 1990s. In the 1980s, members of the coalition were well aware of the need to get rid of the assumption of the exogeneity of individual preferences—one of the two beliefs that, according to Plott, public choice scholars adhered to in the 1970s—as one can see in Luce et al. (1989, pp. 316–7). Members of the MacArthur Research Network on Preferences have made a series of attempts to examine the formation and the evolution of individual preferences (see Bowles & Polanía-Reyes, 2012; Henrich et al., 2004). Samuel Bowles (2016) presents a synthesis of the lessons they have produced. According to him, the endogeneity of preferences is taken for granted in comparative institutional analysis and institutional engineering in the 2010s.