The paper presents the topic modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a form of text-mining aiming at discovering the hidden (latent) thematic structure in large archives of documents. By applying LDA to the full text of the economics articles stored in the JSTOR database, we show how to construct a map of the discipline over time, and illustrate the potentialities of the technique for the study of the shifting structure of economics in a time of (possible) fragmentation.

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Since the 1990s, Sunstein, Jolls, and Thaler have questioned the perfect rationality assumption in law and economics (L&E) and introduced a behavioral approach. But Gregory Mitchell has criticized behavioral law and economics (BL&E). He argues that much of the scholarship within the field describes psychological research as if it provides general laws of thought and behavior rather than insights conditional on the setting, on the characteristics of subjects, and on the specificity of the task in hand. Human heterogeneity is not adequately included in models developed under behavioral assumptions of this kind. This paper argues that Mitchell's work contributes to develop a cognitive approach to Law closer to the cognitive theory of institutions and to the Original Institutional Economics (OIE). Mitchell's contextualist approach seeks to identify the specific conditions under which irrational behavior occurs and to understand when and how it can be remedied.

The article proposes a reading of Marcel Mauss's insights into gift exchange in primitive societies through the lens of the institutional economics approach. It thus tries to demonstrate that the gift as seen by Mauss can be interpreted as an institution arising from the self-transcendence of social relationships that gifts themselves are expressly designed to create and according to which individuals orient their behavior. On this basis, we provide elements to discuss the benefits that might derive from the adoption of the institutionalist approach in economics.

and Hurwicz (1973Hurwicz ( , 1975 focused on the role of social institutions and investigated their impact on economic processes. and Hayek' s (1962Hayek' s ( , 1967bHayek' s ( , 1988a