Marie-José Avenier (CERAG, Grenoble) réagit sur les questions épistémologiques soulevées dans le précédent numéro en défendant le paradigme constructiviste. Pour elle, il s'agit bien d'un paradigme même si elle distingue différents types de constructivisme, fondé sur des hypothèses...

Les recherches qualitatives se veulent souvent exploratoires : elles entendent inventer des concepts, proposer de nouvelles notions et théories. Dans le même temps, pour interpréter les données, elles manient des concepts existants. Mais bien souvent, les notions utilisées ou proposées...

Dans un livre récent, How professors think, Michèle Lamont (Harvard University) analyse la manière dont des chercheurs de différentes disciplines, réunis dans des comités, construisent un jugement collectif en sélectionnant des projets de recherche à financer. L'intérêt de l'ouvrage...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

An axiomatic approach is used to develop a one-parameter family of measures of divergence between distributions. These measures can be used to perform goodness-of-fit tests with good statistical properties. Asymptotic theory shows that the test statistics have well-defined limiting distributions...

This article addresses the important issue of anchoring in contingent valuation surveys that use the double-bounded elicitation format. Anchoring occurs when responses to the follow-up dichotomous choice valuation question are influenced by the bid presented in the initial dichotomous choice...

We examine the statistical performance of inequality indices in the presence of extreme values in the data and show that these indices are very sensitive to the properties of the income distribution. Estimation and inference can be dramatically affected, especially when the tail of the income...

Empirical evidence, obtained from nonparametric estimation of the income distribution, exhibits strong heterogeneity in most populations of interest. It is common, therefore, to suspect that the population is composed of several homogeneous subpopulations. Such an assumption leads us to consider...

Surveys are sometimes viewed with suspicion when used to provide economic values, since they are sensitive to framing effects. However, the extent to which those effects may vary between individuals has received little attention. Are some individuals less sensitive to framing effects than...

This article is a comment on Margaret Slade (2005).