What is it about?

The article argues that institutional economics is more complete and interdisciplinary when it comes to health policy analysis relative to simple political analysis or behavioral economics.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Too much emphasis is placed on silver bullet solutions such as "nudge", when more consideration needs to be given to institutional structure, an approach to prescriptive policy analysis that avoids the trap of seeking a clear bottom line

Perspectives

At the risk of being immodest, few if any people other than myself could have written this article. Nobody else has noticed that Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, mentions organizations as holding solutions to problems of bias in decision making. That observation on his part demonstrates lack of contact between the fields of behavioral economics and organizational theory, the latter having been onto the predictably irrational behavior long before, and going further to expose the failures of organizations as well. Instead of the kind of single minded approaches, such as nudge, spawned by laboratory experiments in human cognition and decision making, the institutional approach encases decision making in terms of comparative institutional analysis (as encouraged by Herbet Simon, Oliver Williamson and Aaron Wildavsky) that combines consideration of ends and means simultaneously.

Professor David Chinitz
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The special interdisciplinary contribution of institutional economics, Health Economics Policy and Law, April 2013, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s1744133113000182.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page