The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Professor Robert Sugden (University of East Anglia) has been awarded the 2019 Joseph B. Gittler Award for his book, The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market.
The annual Joseph B. Gittler Award, which includes a $4,000 monetary prize, is given for an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences. For more information on this award, visit the Joseph B. Gittler Award page.
The selection committee said, “Robert Sugden’s book is a significant and powerful defense of a theory of the foundations of economics, which attempts to derive fundamental axioms and theorems of welfare economics from a contractarian approach in which the criterion of individual interest is not the satisfaction of preferences but rather opportunity. The result is a defense of a regulated and psychologically/socially stable market economy (as opposed to a planned economy). Sugden offers an argument for what is mistaken about neoclassical economics and its problematic reliance on a preference-satisfaction criterion of individual interest.”
Professor Sugden was trained as an economist but works at the interface of economics and philosophy. His research uses a combination of theoretical, experimental, and philosophical methods to investigate issues in welfare economics, the foundations of decision and game theory, choice under uncertainty, the methodology of economics, and the evolution of social conventions. He currently holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant for a research project, “Reconstructing normative economics on a foundation of mutual advantage.”
