This major work challenges some widely held positions in epistemology - those of Peirce and Popper on the one hand and those of Quine and Kuhn on the other.

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...

Conflicts of interest can lead experts to give biased and corrupt advice. Although disclosure is often proposed as a potential solution to these problems, we show that it can have perverse effects. First, people generally do not discount advice from biased advisors as much as they should, even when advisors’ conflicts of interest are disclosed. Second, disclosure can increase the bias in advice because it leads advisors to feel morally licensed and strategically encouraged to exaggerate their advice even further. As (...) a result, disclosure may fail to solve the problems created by conflicts of interest and may sometimes even make matters worse. (shrink)

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Beware of economists bearing advice. Though some of it is valuable, the framework of theoretical welfare economics from which economic advice usually issues has serious normative limitations and distortions. When economists go beyond identifying consequences of policies to making recommendations, they typically rely on a theory whose only normative concern is welfare and its distribution and that mistakenly identifies welfare with the satisfaction of preferences. Their advice about how to increase welfare must accordingly be regarded with caution, and policy makers (...) must not forget that increasing welfare should not be their only goal. (shrink)