A series of recent debates in experimental economics have associated demand effects with the artificiality of the experimental setting and have linked it to the problem of external validity. In this paper, we argue that these associations can be misleading, partly because of the ambiguity with which “artificiality” has been defined, but also because demand effects and external validity are related in complex ways. We argue that artificiality may be directly as well as inversely correlated with demand effects. We also (...) distinguish between the demand effects of experimentation and the reactions that they may trigger and that might endanger experimental validity. We conclude that economists should pay more attention to the way in which subjects construe the experimental task and learn to exploit subjects’ reactivity to expectations in their experiments. (shrink)

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is urging academic medical centers to ban pharmaceutical detailing. This policy followed from a consideration of behavioral and neuroeconomics research. I argue that this research did not warrant the conclusions drawn from it. Pharmaceutical detailing carries risks of cognitive error for physicians, as do other forms of information exchange. Physicians may overcome such risks; those determined to do so may ethically engage in pharmaceutical detailing. Whether or not they should do so is a (...) prudential judgment about which reasonable people may disagree. The AAMC's ethical condemnation of detailing is unwarranted and will subvert efforts to maintain a realm of physician discretion in clinical work that is increasingly threatened in our present practice environment. (shrink)

(2010). Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Pitfalls of Deducing Ethics from Economics: Why the Association of American Medical Colleges is Wrong About Pharmaceutical Detailing”. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. W1-W3.

This article examines how problems of validity in empirical social research differ from those in natural science. Specifically, we focus on how some ontological peculiarities of the object of study in social science bear on validity requirements. We consider these issues in experimental validity as well as in test validity because, while both fields hold large intellectual traditions, research tests or questionnaires are less closely connected to natural science methodology than experiments.

It is sometimes argued that experimental economists do not have to worry about external validity so long as the design sticks closely to a theoretical model. This position mistakes the model for the theory. As a result, applied economics designs often study phenomena distinct from their stated objects of inquiry. Because the implemented models are abstract, they may provide improbable analogues to their stated subject matter. This problem is exacerbated by the relational character of the social world, which also sets (...) epistemic limits for the social science laboratory more generally. (shrink)

The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.