Welcome to "Bargaining Game", a blog about the philosophy of economics
This short post marks the launching of a new blog mainly dedicated to the philosophy of economics. The philosophy of economics is a growing sub-field of economics and through this blog I intend to present and communicate research (including my own, but not only) and ideas that belong to it. Topics and issues belonging to economic philosophy are interesting and important for their own sake, but as I intend to show, they are also relevant for economists, social scientists and more generally for people who have a broad interest in understanding (and also influencing) the way human societies work.
Though this blog is only at its beginning, I am actually not a novice in this exercise since I have been the main contributor of the blog "Rationalité Limitée" for more than 7 years. I intend to cover essentially the same topics here, to write the same kind of (generally long) posts and more generally the use the blog in the same way, i.e. as a way to formalize my ideas and to communicate advancements in the field of economic philosophy. The main (arguably significant) difference is that all the posts here will be written in English. Details on myself and on the general purpose of the blog can be found here.
I would like to finish this inaugural post with a brief note regarding the name of the blog. It reflects one of the ways through which economic philosophy proceeds, namely by using tools from economics (or other social sciences) to tackle philosophical problems. This is of course the case with game theory, in particular through the use of the so-called bargaining game to reflect on the evolution and the working of social norms and morality. Two great examples are given by the philosopher David Gauthier's book Morals by Agreement and the economist Ken Binmore's two volumes book Game Theory and the Social Contracts (I, II). As I said, this does not exhaust economic philosophy, which is also concerned in appraising critically the theories and the practices of economists or even to contribute to economic knowledge directly. This is in this broad sense that I intend to cover economic philosophy here.