Economists Behaving Irrationally (or Economists Gone Wild!)

Brad de Long considers it "the greatest improvement in economics in my lifetime."

He is referring to the Journal of Economic Perspectives' recent decision to allow open access to its articles on the web. I tend to agree with him on this and hope that other serious academic journals follow suit.

Anyway, I took the opportunity to scan the contents of its archives to find articles that discuss a relatively new perspective in the economics profession, and that is how individuals or agents do not act rationally most of the time.

I came upon this one by Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv entitled What's in a surname? The effects of surname initials on academic success. It finds that among leading economics departments in the US, the supposed pre-eminent exemplars of rational decision-making,

Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure (...) are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects.

There you have it, evidence that economists behave irrationally. The authors go on to state

We suspect the “alphabetical discrimination” reported in this paper is linked to the norm in the economics profession prescribing alphabetical ordering of credits on coauthored publications. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology.

Based on this research, not only do economists behave irrationally, their actions are based on others behaving the same way(!) as shown by their careful selection of co-authors and their increasing unwillingness to follow the alphabetical ordering norm. 

I suppose the core principle of economics about people responding to incentives still holds; whether such behaviour is based on rational or irrational norms is quite another thing altogether.