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By Michel VERLAINE, ICN Business School *
Most economists are trained to use as if approaches also called instrumentalism. This approach has been introduced by Friedman in Essays in Positive Economics and implies that theories are not supposed to be realistic descriptions of decision-making but it is important that they provide good predictions. More precisely, if choices are consistent there exists a mathematical function that can be used to model their behaviour in a compact way. This, incidentally, also presupposes that theories can only be used to understand phenomena in a positive approach but not to infer value- judgments in a normative way.
To put it more concretely, as the model has only predictive value, it can only be used to make...
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