Conventional economic theory assumes that consumers are fully rational, that they have well-defined preferences and easily understand the market environment. Yet, in fact, consumers may have inconsistent, context-dependent preferences or simply not enough brain-power to evaluate and compare complicated products. Thus the standard model of consumer behavior-which depends on an ideal market in which consumers are boundlessly rational-is called into question. While behavioral economists have for some time confirmed and characterized these inconsistencies, the logical next step is to examine the implications they have in markets.
Grounded in key observations in consumer psychology, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization develops non-standard models of "boundedly rational" consumer behavior and embeds them into familiar models of markets. It then rigorously analyses each model in the tradition of microeconomic theory, leading to a richer, more realistic picture of consumer behavior. Ran Spiegler analyses phenomena such as exploitative price plans in the credit market, complexity of financial products and other obfuscation practices, consumer antagonism to unexpected price increases, and the role of default options in consumer decision making. Spiegler unifies the relevant literature into three main strands: limited ability to anticipate and control future choices, limited ability to understand complex market environments, and sensitivity to reference points.
Although the challenge of enriching the psychology of decision makers in economic models has been at the frontier of theoretical research in the last decade, there has been no graduate-level, theory-oriented textbook to cover developments in the last 10-15 years. Thus, Bounded Rationality andIndustrial Organization offers a welcome and crucial new understanding of market behavior-it challenges conventional wisdom in ways that are interesting and economically significant, and which in the end effect the well-being of all market participants.

This book reports on an outstanding thesis that has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in the area of automated negotiation. It gives new practical and theoretical insights into the design and evaluation of automated negotiators. It describes an innovative negotiating agent framework that enables systematic exploration of the space of possible negotiation strategies by recombining different agent components. Using this framework, new and effective ways are formulated for an agent to learn, bid, and accept during a negotiation. The findings have been evaluated in four annual instantiations of the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC), the results of which are also outlined here. The book also describes several methodologies for evaluating and comparing negotiation strategies and components, with a special emphasis on performance and accuracy measures.

The writings of Luigi Einaudi (1874-1961) testify to the author's outstanding contribution to economics during his long career as economist, historian and policy-maker. Of special note is his work on the taxation of consumption rather than income. Throughout his career Einaudi argued the economic and political case for European unity, anticipating the need for a common market and monetary union. His writings on money and on political and economic liberalism are enlivened by a down-to-earth conception of the market and grounded in profound historical and institutional knowledge. This book makes an important selection of his works available in English for the first time.

 The dynamics of the digital economy in the US, Europe and Japan are rather different. Some EU countries come close to the USA as the leading OECD country in the new economy, but Japan faces particular problems in catching-up digitally. Information and communication technology will affect productivity growth, production, the financial system and trade. Setting adequate rules for the digital economy - at the national and international level - is a key challenge for industrialized countries. Moreover, cultural and organizational challenges will also have to be met.

This book tells the story of one of the most important public figures of the twentieth century. It is the first full biography of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who became, over the course of a remarkable career, the great philosopher of liberty in our time. In this richly detailed portrait, Alan Ebenstein chronicles the life, works, and legacy of a visionary thinker, from Hayek's early years as the scholarly son of a physician in fin-de-siecle Vienna on an increasingly wider world as an economist and political philosopher in Londom, New York, and Chicago. Ebenstein gives a balanced, integrated account of Hayek's extordinary diverse body of work, from his fist encounter with the free market ideas of mentor Ludwig Von Mises to his magisterial writings in later life on the legal, political, ethical, and economic requirements of a free society. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, Hayek's vision of a renewed classical liberalism-of free markets and free ideas in free societies-has taken hold in much of the world. Alan Ebanstein's clearly written account is an essential starting point for anyone seeking to understand why Hayek's ideas have become the guiding force of our time. His illuminating portrait of Hayek the man brings to new life the spirit of a great scholar and tenacious advocate who has become, in Peter Drucker's words, "our time's preeminent social philosopher."

This volume is the product of the "Sixth Annual SEEP-Conference on Economic Ethics and Philosophy" on the theme of 'Cultural Factors in Economic Growth' held at Marienrode Monastry, Hildesheim, in April 1998. Our thanks go to our colleagues (including Avner Offner, whose paper could not be included here), the staff at the monastry, and Professor Peter Koslowski of the Forschungsinstitut fUr Philo sophie Hannover, and editor of this series, for contributing to a very enjoyable conference and, we hope, an interesting collection of essays. Mark Casson and Andrew Godley University of Reading, March 2000 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Chapter 1 Cultural Factors in Economic Growth MARK CASSON AND ANDREW GODLEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2 Trust as a Governance Device BART NOOTEBOOM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Chapter 3 A Measure of Culture: Trust and Defection in Southern Italy FRANCESCO L. GALASSI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Chapter 4 Entrepreneurial Minorities: A Typology WILLIAM D. RUBINSTEIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III Chapter 5 Cultural Determinants of Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the UK and USA and British and American Culture ANDREW GODLEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 CONTENTS Chapter 6 Jurisprudence, Expected Value, and the Culture ofInnovation FRED V. CARSTENSEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Chapter 7 Constitutions, Liberties, and Growth in Pre-Modem Europe STEPHAN R. EpSTEIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Chapter 8 Culture and the Myth of Economic Determinism in Global History and World Politics KEN DARK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Chapter 9 The Case for a Shared World Language ERIC L. JONES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 0 List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This book provides a critical reading of Foucault's writings on the archaeology of political economy, analyzing some of Foucault's contributions to the methodology of economics, historiography of economic thought and studies on Adam Smith's context and writings. It reconstructs Foucault's archaeology, relating it to current debates in economics.

In recent years, the usual optimisation techniques, which have proved so useful in microeconomic theory, have been extended to incorporate more powerful topological and differential methods, and these methods have led to new results on the qualitative behaviour of general economic and political systems. These developments have necessarily resulted in an increase in the degree of formalism in the publications in the academic journals. This formalism can often deter graduate students. The progression of ideas presented in this book will familiarize the student with the geometric concepts underlying these topological methods, and, as a result, make mathematical economics, general equilibrium theory, and social choice theory more accessible.

This volume will introduce the readers to an alternative nexus of education, equity and economy, pointing to economies and educations that promote a less stratified and exploitive world, and as the chapter authors demonstrate, this view has a wide range of applications, from technology, mathematics, to environmental catastrophes and indigenous cultures. This first volume in the new book series not only introduces the series itself, but also several authors whose chapters that appear here presage the in-depth analysis that will be offered by their volumes in the series. Education is invoked repeatedly in the 'class warfare' that pits the population against the elites as the investment that makes the difference, in terms of both policy and individual commitment, in the economy. The economy in this scenario is competitive, accumulative, exploitive and stratifying, implying education should mirror this and prepare people to fit this economy. However, education has other historic goals of developing common cultures, national identities, and civic engagement that belie this form of economic determinism. This volume and the series will explore this new nexus of economy and education with equity.

This title offers an in-depth analysis of the psychological causes and consequences of, and proposed interventions for over-eating. The author examines the history of obesity and its distribution by social class and geography, the environmental effects of overconsumption and economic remedies such as the introduction of a sugar tax to reduce obesity. Joshua also considers the politics of corporate social responsibility of food and beverage corporations and how this could prevent poor health decisions. This is the final title in a four volume series 'The Economics of Addictive Behaviours', consisting of three additional volumes on smoking, alcohol abuse and illicit drug abuse.

This volume compiles five papers modeling the effects of neoliberal economics on the emergence of Ebola and its aftermath. Neoliberalism is currently the world's primary economic philosophy. It centers international relations around globalizing laissez-faire economics for multinational companies, promoting free trade, deregulating economic markets, and shifting state expenditures in favor of private property. The multidisciplinary teams represented here place both Ebola Makona, the Zaire Ebola virus variant that has infected 28,000 in West Africa, and Ebola Reston, which is currently emerging in industrial hog farms in the Philippines and China, within a multi-plank modeling framework. Using a stochastic extinction model that one group spatializes, environmental stochasticity across the ecologies in which Ebola evolves is treated as an ecosystemic prophylaxis. An agroecological logic gate is developed for epidemic control. A Black-Scholes model explicitly links economic margins across agricultural systems to success in biocontrol. This new control theory is further developed around the data-rate and rate-distortion theorems, a turbulence model, and cognitive symmetry breaking. Lastly, a model of pandemic penetrance is used to explore the domino effects of serious outbreaks amplifying through the cascades of disasters that can follow deadly pandemics. All the models presented are contextualized by socioeonomic geographies specific to outbreak locales.Together the models suggest shifts in regional agroeconomics under the neoliberal doctrine, driving deforestation and monoculture production, destroying the ecosystemic "friction" with which local forests typically disrupt Ebola transmission. The resulting collapse in such an ecological function accelerates pathogen spillover and propagation across the remaining host populations. The failure on the part of current control efforts to assimilate such a structural context may render even an efficacious vaccine dysfunctional. The authors propose an alternate science of disease and an adjunct program of interventions useful to researchers and public health officials alike.

social network analysis has been an established eld since the 1950s; in computer and information sciences, in biology, and of course in mathematics (graph theory) networks are central representations of objects and methods (De Nooy, forthc- ing). More detailed bibliometric studies have examined the individual, cognitive, and institutional composition of complex network theory (Morris and Yen 2004), and social network theory (Otte and Rousseau 2002). Among the more impor- .. tant pieces of literature are Borner et al. (2007), Bornholdt and Schuster (2003), Buchanan (2002), Dorogovtsev and Mendes (2003), Otte and Rousseau (2002), Newman (2003), and Watts (1999, 2004). Of these, Borner .. et al. (2007) stand out because they have most recently re-examined network science, considering it as a possible innovation in information science. All the reviews mentioned include efforts to build bridges between different scienti c disciplines and specialties. In this book we draw particular attention to the link between evolutionary economics and statistical physics. Despite this impressive development, claims that an entirely new science has been created (Barabasi ' 2002) have nevertheless been the subject of criticism. - depth analyses of a subset of "complex networks" contributions (1991-2003) have shown that the notion of "complex networks" was already prevalent in a number of different elds before it became practically a "brand name" or the popular label for a new specialty area in physics, or a new cross-disciplinary paradigm.

Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism offers compelling and intersectional religious critiques of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the normative rationality of contemporary global capitalism that orders people to live by the generalized principle of competition in all social spheres of life. Keri Day asserts that neoliberalism and its moral orientations consequently breed radical distrust, lovelessness, disconnection, and alienation within society. She argues that engaging black feminist and womanist religious perspectives with Jewish and Christian discourses offers more robust critiques of a neoliberal economy. Employing womanist and black feminist religious perspectives, this book provides six theoretical, theologically constructive arguments to challenge the moral fragmentation associated with global markets. It strives to envision a pragmatic politics of hope.

In this book, Thompson and Hickson strongly challenge the standard interpretation of the basis of growth and viability of dominant wealthy nations. Briefly, efforts of the economically wealthy and the government leaders to increase their wealth and protect it from aggressors, internal and external, are cast in a new evolutionary light. The challenge is to the idea that societies leading intellectual formulators of political and social policy have been helpful. Their alternative, and persuasive, interpretation is that the rise and survival of wealthier nations has been achieved because of an effective democracy'. The authors explain why an effective democratic state must avoid narrow, short-sighted', rational appearing concessions to a sequence of aggressors. In short, the Thompson-Hickson interpretation of the rise of wealthy dominant nations does not rely on advice of superior intellectual advisors, but instead rests on the pragmatic, almost ad hoc, actions of democratic legislators.

Richard America here redefines the complex problems of racial economic injustice, poverty, inequality, and lagging competitiveness and productivity in the United States. In a sure-to-be-controversial analysis, the author argues that there is a true debt owed by White America to Black America, that this debt is significant, and that it has now come due. He estimates the size of Whites' debt to Blacks, shows how that debt came to be, and suggests creative ways of paying it back. This book argues persuasively that the social and racial problems in the United States cannot be solved until we acknowledge that the "haves" truly and literally owe money to the "have nots."

The virtues and failings of market economies are at present widely debated and the outcome of the debate is of practical importance. This book contains essays that address these issues of economic policy ranging from privatization of industry and financial markets to education and the proposal for an internal market in the health service. Apart from two general theoretical pieces, particular markets, and proposals for creating such markets, are studied.

This handbook provides an overview on major developments that occurred in the field of economic sociology after its rebirth since the 1980s in the US. It offers new insights on the uniqueness of European economic sociology compared to US economic sociology which emerged at the end of the 20th century. The handbook presents economic sociology as a developing field which started with certain foundations as new economic sociology, widening the perspective by introducing social factors thereby focusing more on general belief systems, social forms of coordination and the relationships between society and the economy. It offers an outstanding portrait of the research field helping to identify major foundations and trajectories as well as new research perspectives for a globalized economic sociology. This makes the handbook appeal to specialized researchers of the field, researchers from other disciplines interested in economic phenomena, as well as graduate and postgraduate students.

This volume describes the construction method for a global accounting framework, referred to as the world accounting matrix (WAM). The WAM allows for the consistent presentation of international trade and finance figures in relation to domestic saving and investment. The book aims to show how a WAM can be used for the analysis of trade and finance in a global context. It also seeks to show how WAM can contribute to the solution of the large statistical problems in national and global macroeconomic data.

Industry, Space and Competition rediscovers the contributions of the past on industrial organization and spatial economics and analyses these within the context of current movements towards globalization, regionalization and localization.It re-examines the work of von Thunen, Marshall, Weber and Perroux as well as re-assessing less well-known authors including Quesnay, George and Hearn whose contributions have previously been largely disregarded. The book analyses their contributions to spatial economics, industrial organization and economic geography within an historical context. The authors then go on to discuss related issues which are not strictly from the discipline of economics. Finally the authors propose that there should be more interaction with other disciplines including history and geography in order to gain a greater understanding of the subject. This book will be welcomed by historians of economic thought, regional economists, industrial economists, especially those interested in industrial organisation and competition, and scholars of international economics and economic geography.

The book provides an overview of some of the recent techniques that have been applied to an understanding of the structure of regional and interregional exchange within national economies. The issues range from an evaluation of NAFTA, comparisons of regional economies, structral change over time and issues related to measurement and interpretation. Many of the contributions address the problems using network structures.

Survey based valuation techniques like the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) rely particularly on the premise of respondents' rationality when answering willingness to pay (WTP) questions. Results of CVM surveys have repeatedly put this fundamental assumption into question. This study adopts a more realistic view of rationality accounting for respondents' limited capacities to process information. Based on cognitive psychology a technique to detect and analyze the bounds of rationality inherent in WTP statements is developed. Using an empirical example, the influence of bounded rationality on the validity of CVM results is analyzed. It is shown that individual differences in information processing play a major role. From these results recommendations for future survey design are developed.

"Marx's Theory of Price and its Modern Rivals "provides an original look at how Marx understood the role of money, extending his theory to consider how prices move over the course of business cycles. Key modern theories of price are also analyzed; Neoclassical, Post Keynesian and Sraffian theories are contrasted with Marxian thought.

Economists are sometimes praised and often chastised for what happens to the nation and the world economies. But what exactly do economists do to earn either praise or scorn? Author Attiat F. Ott with Sheila Vegari explores the answer to that question in "What Economists Do: A Journey through the History of Economic Thought."

Ott and Vegari outline the discipline of economics through the views and ideas of nine political economists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries. The chronologies of ideas involve a journey through the history of economic thought from Adam Smith's The "Wealth of Nations" to Nobel Laureate James Buchanan's "The Calculus of Consent."

This study reviews some of the arguments offered about economics as a science, presents the concepts of political economy, and discusses the principles of the macro economy as put forth by John Maynard Keynes in "The General Theory." It also covers the idea of the public economy advanced by the classical economists and augmented by the work of Paul Samuelson, Richard Musgrave, Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan. It examines the role of the economist as a teacher, a political economist, and as an adviser to policy makers.

"What Economists Do: A Journey through the History of Economic Thought" provides an intriguing picture of how economics has come of age through a chronology of ideas and principles that shape the world's economies.

Advances in Austrian Economics connects the Austrian tradition of economics with other research traditions in economics and related areas. Each volume attempts to apply the insights of Austrian economics and related approaches to topics that are of current interest in economics and cognate disciplines. The edited volume approach delivers ideas from multiple contributors in one book, providing a forum for variety and contrasting perspectives among those working in these areas. As such, Advances fills an important niche in the world of Austrian economics. Austrian school economists are the primary audience, but this series will appeal to people working in a variety of positions in economics and related disciplines. Those working in public choice, new institutionalism, cognitive or behavior economics, entrepreneurship, and other areas will find value in the series. Areas of coverage are quite open, as long as there remains a connection to the ideas associated with the Austrian school, broadly interpreted.