Wahrnehmung und Wirklichkeit in der Volkswirtschaftslehre

Perceptions of reality and reality itself should not be confounded. This applies especially to the economic sphere. We demonstrate in this paper how economists – also in comparison to other scientific disciplines – intend to deal with the subject. Given the fact that (comprehensive) rational perceptions, quite in analogy to rational expectations, are hard to meet, one needs additional explanatory approaches, which, being a part of behavioral economics, are capable to account for deviations from rationality. Prospect theory turns out to be extremely powerful in this respect. With prospect theory, it is easy to justify the coexistence of equity and inequity aversion attitudes when it comes to evaluate personal income distribution. So far, empirical evidence with regard to the occurrence of both equity and inequity aversion is mixed, to say the least. Most likely, however, this is so far (only) due to the lack of a clear catalogue of criteria to build appropriate sub-samples of countries. The latter has been an important task for empirical growth research in the past when the aim was to detect economic convergence among „clubs“ or subsamples of countries.