The Future of Health Economics

This paper discusses health economics as a behavioral science and as input into health policy and health services research. I illustrate the dual role with data on publications and citations of two leading health economics journals and three leading American health economists. Five important, relatively new topics in economics are commended to health economists who focus on economics as a behavioral science. This is followed by suggestions for health economists in their role of providing input to health policy and health services research. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of economics, the role of values, and the potential for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. The fourth section presents reasons why I believe the strong demand for health economics will continue, and the paper concludes with a sermon addressed primarily to recent entrants to the field.

Foundations of Behavioral and Experimental Economics: Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith

Advanced information on the Prize in Economic Sciences 2002. Until recently, economics was widely regarded as a non-experimental science that had to rely on observation of real-world economies rather than controlled laboratory experiments. Many commentators also found restrictive the common assumption of a homo oeconomicus motivated by self-interest and capable of making rational decisions. But research in economics has taken off in new directions. A large and growing body of scientific work is now devoted to the empirical testing and modification of traditional postulates in economics, in particular those of unbounded rationality, pure self-interest, and complete self-control. Moreover, today's research increasingly relies on new data from laboratory experiments rather than on more traditional field data, that is, data obtained from observations of real economies. This recent research has its roots in two distinct, but converging, traditions: theoretical and empirical studies of human decision-making in cognitive psychology, and tests of predictions from economic theory by way of laboratory experiments. Today, behavioral economics and experimental economics are among the most active fields in economics, as measured by publications in major journals, new doctoral dissertations, seminars, workshops and conferences. This year's laureates are pioneers of these two fields of research.behavioral economics; experimental economics

Bayesian and Non-Bayesian Approaches to Scientific Modeling and Inference in Economics and Econometrics

After brief remarks on the history of modeling and inference techniques in economics and econometrics , attention is focused on the emergence of economic science in the 20th century. First, the broad objectives of science and the Pearson-Jeffreys' "unity of science" principle will be reviewed. Second, key Bayesian and non-Bayesian practical scientific inference and decision methods will be compared using applied examples from economics, econometrics and business. Third, issues and controversies on how to model the behavior of economic units and systems will be reviewed and the structural econometric modeling, time series analysis (SEMTSA) approach will be described and illustrated using a macro-economic modeling and forecasting problem involving analyses of data for 18 industrialized countries over the years since the 1950s. Point and turning point forecasting results will be summarized. Last, a few remarks will be made about the future of scientific inference and modeling techniques in economics and econometrics.

The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters

To many, Thomas Carlyle's put-down of economics as "the dismal science" is as fitting now as it was 150 years ago. But Diane Coyle argues that economics today is more soulful than dismal, a more practical and human science than ever before. Building on the popularity of books such as Freakonomics that have applied economic thinking to the paradoxes of everyday life, The Soulful Science describes the remarkable creative renaissance in how economics is addressing the most fundamental questions--and how it is starting to help solve problems such as poverty and global warming. A lively and entertaining tour of the most exciting new economic thinking about big-picture problems, The Soulful Science uncovers the hidden humanization of economics over the past two decades. Coyle shows how better data, increased computing power, and techniques such as game theory have transformed economic theory and practice in recent years, enabling economists to make huge strides in understanding real human behavior. Using insights from psychology, evolution, and complexity, economists are revolutionizing efforts to solve the world's most serious problems by giving policymakers a new and vastly more accurate picture of human society than ever before. They are also building our capacity to understand how what we do today shapes what the world will look like tomorrow. And the consequences of these developments for human life, for governments, and for businesses are only now starting to be realized--in areas such as resource auctions, pollution-credit trading, and monetary policy. The Soulful Science tells us how economics got its soul back--and how it just might help save the planet's.problems, poverty, global warming, game theory, human behavior, psychology, evolution, complexity, resource auctions, pollution-credit trading

Marketing and Data Science: Together the Future is Ours

The synergistic use of computer science and marketing science techniques offers the best avenue for knowledge development and improved applications. A broad area of complementarity between the typical focus in statistics and computer science and that in marketing offers great potential. The former fields tend to focus on pattern recognition, control and prediction. Many marketing analyses embrace these directions, but also contribute by modeling structure and exploring causal relationships. Marketing has successfully combined foci from management science with foci from psychology and economics. These fields complement each other because they enable a broad spectrum of scientific approaches. Combined, they provide both understanding and practical solutions to important and relevant managerial marketing problems, and marketing science is already very successful at obtaining unique insights from big data

Experimental economics: science or what?

Do we want experimental economics to evolve into a genuine science? This paper uses the literature on inequity aversion as a case study in warning that we are at risk of losing the respect of other scientific disciplines if we continue to accept the wide claims about human behavior that are currently being advanced without examining either the data from which the claims are supposedly derived or the methodology employed in analyzing the data

A Suggested Method for the Measurement of World-Leading Research (Illustrated with Data on Economics)

Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics. Of 450 genuinely world-leading journal articles, the UK produced 10%, and the rest of Europe slightly more. Interestingly, more than a quarter of these elite UK articles came from outside the best-known university departments. The proposed methodology could be applied to almost any academic discipline or nation.Research Excellence Framework (REF), peer-review, United Kingdom, European economics, evaluation, science, citations, Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)

Making dynamic modelling effective in economics

Mathematics has been extremely effective in physics, but not in economics beyond finance. To establish economics as science we should follow the Galilean method and try to deduce mathematical models of markets from empirical data, as has been done for financial markets. Financial markets are nonstationary. This means that 'value' is subjective. Nonstationarity also means that the form of the noise in a market cannot be postulated a priroi, but must be deduced from the empirical data. I discuss the essence of complexity in a market as unexpected events, and end with a biological speculation about market growth.Economics; fniancial markets; stochastic process; Markov process; complex systems

High-ranked social science journal articles can be identified from early citation information

Do citations accumulate too slowly in the social sciences to be used to assess the quality of recent articles? I investigate whether this is the case using citation data for all articles in economics and political science published in 2006 and indexed in the Web of Science. I find that citations in the first two years after publication explain more than half of the variation in cumulative citations received over a longer period. Journal impact factors improve the correlation between the predicted and actual future ranks of journal articles when using citation data from 2006 alone but the effect declines sharply thereafter. Finally, more than half of the papers in the top 20% in 2012 were already in the top 20% in the year of publication (2006)