Industrial production and consumption patterns rely heavily on the intensive use of both renewable and non-renewable resources and the consequences for the environment can be serious. Following a long period of time where the profit incentives of firms have prevailed over preservation of the environment and the world's natural resources, a new consensus has emerged concerning the need to regulate firm behaviour, aimed at ensuring the sustainability of the economic system in the long run. This book offers an exhaustive overview of current economic debate about these topics, taking modern oligopoly theory as a benchmark. The first part of the book covers static models dealing with incentives for green research and development, Pigovian taxation, cartels, environmental quality and international trade, as well as the role of corporate social responsibility, public firms and consumer environmental awareness as endogenous regulatory instruments. Then, the author moves on to examine the role of time while drawing from optimal control and differential game theory. This opens the way to the discussion of fair discount rates to ensure the welfare of future generations, as well as the long run sustainability of production and consumption patterns.

Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy presents a unique combination of analysis of both international trade and investment policies, and competition and regulatory policies. Increasingly, policymakers, businesses and the law and economics professions need to better understand how changes and policy developments in international trade and competition developed and how their interaction impacts on global business. In addition to providing a comprehensive analysis of the attempts of international trade theory and practice to deal with tariffs, non-tariff barriers, market distortions and failures to protect various kinds of property rights, this book contains a detailed treatment of how property rights protection, including intangible property rights are a critical element of ensuring open trade and competitive markets. It examines how these rights have developed over time, and how they have been integrated into trade and competition policy. This book will be of significant interest to students of international business, professors of economics, law and business, and policymakers at the intersection of trade, investment, competition and property rights.

This book draws together the key contributions to the major areas of microeconomic theory from the last few decades. It is intended to provide both undergraduate and graduate students with an essential guide to the current state of the discipline. The articles have been carefully selected not only for the role they have played in the progress of microeconomics, but also for their usefulness and potential to inspire future research. The main themes covered include consumer theory, the theory of the firm, the theory of markets, pricing theory, and labor compensation theory, with the common threads of transaction costs, strategic decisions, and information imperfections. Unlike similar anthologies, this Reader also draws attention to methodological issues and heterodox approaches to microeconomics. Amongst those whose works appear here are Gary Becker, George Stigler, Harvey Leibenstein, Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Avinash Dixit and Paul Klemperer. This Reader will be an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in economics, as well as casual readers interested in an "insider's view" of the discipline. It serves not only to collect in a single place the most significant papers in economics that have been published in recent decades but also, with several introduction chapters, to give the literature a coherent structure.

Discover an exceptionally clear, concise introduction to microeconomics using an approach that avoids high-level mathematics but still offers meaningful practice with Nicholson/Snyder's INTERMEDIATE MICROECONOMICS AND ITS APPLICATION, 13E. These prestigious authors present the economics of markets using a managerial focus and a variety of approaches, including intuitive illustrations, graphical presentations and some simple algebra. A wealth of relevant applications and current examples demonstrate microeconomics at work in a variety of settings. In addition, updated step-by-step video problems and engaging activities allow you to learn by doing. This edition's full-color revisions explain the latest developments and events, including the economic impact of the COVID pandemic. New MindTap online resources are also available to further strengthen your mastery of microeconomic concepts.

In the twentieth century, urban growth was one of the most powerful catalysts of geographical, social and demographic change in the Western world. When this book was first published in 1989, however, a massive process of counter-urbanization was underway, which saw the loss of population and jobs in cities and a pronounced urban to rural shift. This book analyses the causes and consequences of urban decline in Britain and the developed world during this period and beyond, and assesses the implications for urban planning and policy. David Clark's relevant and comprehensive title will be of value to students with a particular interest in urban geography and development.

This book analyses the relative importance of small firms in industrial economies. It brings together a series of studies spanning a spectrum of selected countries in developed Western nations and Eastern Europe to identify the exact role of small firms and how this role has evolved. A striking result which emerges is that a distinct and consistent shift away from large firms and towards small enterprises has occurred within the manufacturing sector of all Western countries, while the role of small firms in Eastern European nations has been remarkably restricted, and, indeed, all these countries have experienced a shift away from small firms. It is clear from this analysis that a major challenge for political and economic reform in Central and Eastern Europe is to create the strong entrepreneurial sector which exists in the West.

Recognising that the economy is a complex system with boundedly rational interacting agents, the book presents a theory of behavioral rationality and heterogeneous expectations in complex economic systems and confronts the nonlinear dynamic models with empirical stylized facts and laboratory experiments. The complexity modeling paradigm has been strongly advocated since the late 1980s by some economists and by multidisciplinary scientists from various fields, such as physics, computer science and biology. More recently the complexity view has also drawn the attention of policy makers, who are faced with complex phenomena, irregular fluctuations and sudden, unpredictable market transitions. The complexity tools - bifurcations, chaos, multiple equilibria - discussed in this book will help students, researchers and policy makers to build more realistic behavioral models with heterogeneous expectations to describe financial market movements and macro-economic fluctuations, in order to better manage crises in a complex global economy.

Upon its publication in 1989, this was the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Latin American School of Development and an invaluable guide to the major Third World contribution to development theory. The four major strands in the work of Latin American Theorists are: structuralism, internal colonialism, marginality and dependency. Exploring all four in detail, and the interconnections between them, Cristobal Kay highlights the developed world's over-reliance on, and partial knowledge of, dependency theory in its approach to development issues, and analyses the first major challenges to neo-classical and modernisation theories from the Third World.

The management of buyer-supplier relations has come to be regarded as a key to achieving manufacturing competitiveness, particularly in sectors facing global competition based on both price and quality. This book is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the link between the type of buyer-supplier relations and corporate performance. Dr Sako examines how British and Japanese companies in the electronics industry manage their relationships with buyers and suppliers, the empirical study comprising a three-way comparison of a Japanese customer company, a British customer company, and a Japanese company in Britain, and an analysis of 36 supplier companies in Britain and Japan. Variations of the companies' business practices are assessed in terms of technology, the nature of market competition, the national legal framework, financial structures, employment systems, and the mode of entrepreneurship. The author identifies two distinct approaches in the two countries - the arm's-length contractual relation (ACR) in Britain, and the obligational contractual relation (OCR) in Japan - and argues that the trust and interdependence present in the latter can be a powerful springboard from which to achieve corporate success.

First published in 1984, this title discusses the emergence of both the orthodox and political economy based approaches to underdevelopment in geography , critically assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and showing the relationship between intellectual developments and changing material conditions. The work is primarily concerned with theories, though it does contain much empirical material drawn from throughout the Third World. The book examines the emergence of theories of development historically and considers the various contemporary theoretical 'schools', both Marxist and non-Marxist. It goes on to consider four aspects of development which are of particular interest to geographers, namely the world economy, regional imbalances, the human-nature theme and the analysis of urban space, and concludes by suggesting some directions for future research.

There is widespread acceptance that much of the developed world faces a potential pensions and welfare crisis as a result of declining birth rates and an ageing population. However, there is considerable uncertainty about the specifics of demographic forecasting and this has significant implications for public finances. Uncertain Demographics and Fiscal Sustainability addresses the economic consequences of uncertainty and, with particular reference to European economies, explores the impact of demographic risks on public finances, including pension systems, health care and old-age care expenditures. Covering a spectrum of theoretical and empirical approaches, different types of computational models are used to demonstrate not only the magnitudes of the uncertainties involved but also how these can be addressed through policy initiatives. The book is divided into four parts covering demographic, measurement, policy and methodological issues. Each part is followed by a discussion essay that draws out key elements and identifies common themes.

This work examines America's growing underground economy--its size, nature, and economic effects. The study begins with a critical analysis of the various methods used for measuring the size of the underground economy in the United States. It then develops a definition of the underground economy which is consistent with our system of national accounts. A sector-by-sector approach is used to measure the actual size of this sub-economy and to estimate the labor force involved. Finally, the author explores the economic consequences for the general economy of significant underground economic activity--for example: tax evasion, economic efficiency, and cyclical aspects.

This work will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy-makers in economics, economic policy, political science, and criminology.

It is often said that everyone understands precisely what is meant by the notion of probability-except those who have spent their lives studying the matter. Upon close scrutiny, the intuitively obvious idea of probability becomes quite elusive. Is it a subjective or objective concept? Are random variables simply improperly measured deterministic variables, or inherently random? What is meant by the phrase "other things held constant" that often appears in descriptions of probability? These questions involve fundamental philosophical and scientific issues, and promise to elude definitive answers for some time. The same type of difficulty arises when attempting to produce a volume on microeconomic theory. The obvious first question-what is microeconomic theory?--

? In his "Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prezzi in Firenze" (1939), Giuseppe Parenti, by Fernand Braudel regarded as an author who "se classait, d'entree de jeu et sans discussion possible, a la hauteur meme d'Earl Jefferson Hamilton. . . . " begins his opening lines with a description/de?nition of the price revolution which took place in the XVI in Europe as "that extraordinary enhancement of all things that occurred in European countries around the second half of the XVI; revolution in the true meaning of the word, as not only, like any strong price increase, it modi?ed the wealth distribution process and changed the relative position of the various social categories and of the different functions of the economic activity, but affected too, in a way that was not enough studied yet, the relative evolution of the various national economies, and ?nally, . . . . . . . . . ., certainly contributed to the birth, or at least to the dissemination, of the new naturalistic economic ideas, from which the economic science would have sprung." De?nition that can be taken as the founding metaphor of this volume."

Modem geometric methods combine the intuitiveness of spatial visualization with the rigor of analytical derivation. Classical analysis is shown to provide a foundation for the study of geometry while geometrical ideas lead to analytical concepts of intrinsic beauty. Arching over many subdisciplines of mathematics and branching out in applications to every quantitative science, these methods are, notes the Russian mathematician A.T. Fomenko, in tune with the Renais sance traditions. Economists and finance theorists are already familiar with some aspects of this synthetic tradition. Bifurcation and catastrophe theo ries have been used to analyze the instability of economic models. Differential topology provided useful techniques for deriving results in general equilibrium analysis. But they are less aware of the central role that Felix Klein and Sophus Lie gave to group theory in the study of geometrical systems. Lie went on to show that the special methods used in solving differential equations can be classified through the study of the invariance of these equations under a continuous group of transformations. Mathematicians and physicists later recognized the relation between Lie's work on differential equations and symme try and, combining the visions of Hamilton, Lie, Klein and Noether, embarked on a research program whose vitality is attested by the innumerable books and articles written by them as well as by biolo gists, chemists and philosophers."

Emerging Competition in Postal and Delivery Services brings together practitioners, postal administrators, the courier industry, regulators, academic economists and lawyers to examine important policy and regulatory issues facing the postal and delivery industries. This volume reviews such topics as cost and productivity analysis, universal service and entry, demand analysis and the structure of postal payment system, price regulation and competition.

Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a provocative and constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.

For a number of years, I have been teaching and doing research in the economics of uncertainty, information, and insurance. Although it is now possible to find textbooks and books of essays on uncertainty and in formation in economics and finance for graduate students and researchers, there is no equivalent material that covers advanced research in insurance. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap in literature. It provides original surveys and essays in the field of insurance economics. The contributions offer basic reference, new material, and teaching supple ments to graduate students and researchers in economics, finance, and insurance. It represents a complement to the book of readings entitled Foundations of Insurance Economics - Readings in Economics and Finance, recently published by the S.S. Huebner Foundation of Insurance Education. In that book, the editors (G. Dionne and S. Harrington) disseminate key papers in the literature and publish an original survey of major contributions in the field."

A critical issue in research and development (R&D) management is the structure and use of evaluative efforts for R&D programs. The book introduces the different methods that may be used in R&D evaluation and then illustrates these methods by describing actual evaluation in practice using those methods. The book is divided into two sections. The first section provides an introduction and details on several popular methodologies used in the evaluation of research and development activities. The second half of the book focuses on evaluation in practice and is comprised of several chapters offering the perspectives of individuals in different types of organizations. The book concludes with an annotated bibliography of selected R&D evaluation literature, focusing on post-1985 literature, on research evaluation.

General equilibrium In this book we try to cope with the challenging task of reviewing the so called general equilibrium model and of discussing one specific aspect of the approach underlying it, namely, market completeness. With the denomination "general equilibrium" (from now on in short GE) we shall mainly refer to two different things. On one hand, in particular when using the expression "GE approach", we shall refer to a long established methodolog ical tradition in building and developing economic models, which includes, as of today, an enormous amount of contributions, ranging in number by several 1 thousands * On the other hand, in particular when using the expression "stan dard differentiable GE model", we refer to a very specific version of economic model of exchange and production, to be presented in Chapters 8 and 9, and to be modified in Chapters 10 to 15. Such a version is certainly formulated within the GE approach, but it is generated by making several quite restrictive 2 assumptions * Even to list and review very shortly all the collective work which can be ascribed to the GE approach would be a formidable task for several coauthors in a lifetime perspective. The book instead intends to address just a single issue. Before providing an illustration of its main topic, we feel the obligation to say a word on the controversial character of GE. First of all, we should say that we identify the GE approach as being based 3 on three principles .

Part I provides an introduction to this study of players' beliefs and decision rules in to obtain data in order to public good games. The experimental method will be used test theoretical ideas about beliefs and decision rules. Chapter 1 discusses some methodological issues concerning experimentation in the social sciences. In particular, this chapter focuses on the relationship between experimental economics and social psychology. Chapter 2 provides an overview of psychological and economic ideas concerning players' beliefs and decision rules in public good games. This chapter forms the theoretical foundation of the book. Chapter 3 discusses some basic experimental tools which will be used in the experiments to be reported in part II. These basic experimental tools make up two procedures, to obtain a measure of a player's social orientation and a measure of her or his beliefs. 1. Experimentation in the social sciences 1.1 Introduction The study of human behavior is an area where economics and psychology overlap. Although both disciplines are concerned with the same human beings, they often have different points of view on how people make choices and the motivation behind it.

Aggregation of individual opinions into a social decision is a problem widely observed in everyday life. For centuries people tried to invent the best' aggregation rule. In 1951 young American scientist and future Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow formulated the problem in an axiomatic way, i.e., he specified a set of axioms which every reasonable aggregation rule has to satisfy, and obtained that these axioms are inconsistent. This result, often called Arrow's Paradox or General Impossibility Theorem, had become a cornerstone of social choice theory. The main condition used by Arrow was his famous Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. This very condition pre-defines the local' treatment of the alternatives (or pairs of alternatives, or sets of alternatives, etc.) in aggregation procedures. Remaining within the framework of the axiomatic approach and based on the consideration of local rules, Arrovian Aggregation Models investigates three formulations of the aggregation problem according to the form in which the individual opinions about the alternatives are defined, as well as to the form of desired social decision. In other words, we study three aggregation models. What is common between them is that in all models some analogue of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives condition is used, which is why we call these models Arrovian aggregation models. Chapter 1 presents a general description of the problem of axiomatic synthesis of local rules, and introduces problem formulations for various versions of formalization of individual opinions and collective decision. Chapter 2 formalizes precisely the notion of rationality' of individual opinions and social decision. Chapter 3 deals with the aggregation model for the case of individual opinions and social decisions formalized as binary relations. Chapter 4 deals with Functional Aggregation Rules which transform into a social choice function individual opinions defined as choice functions. Chapter 5 considers another model &endash; Social Choice Correspondences when the individual opinions are formalized as binary relations, and the collective decision is looked for as a choice function. Several new classes of rules are introduced and analyzed.

Expected utility provides simple, testable properties of the optimum behavior that should be displayed by risk-averse individuals in risky decisions. Simultaneously, given the existence of paradoxes under the expected utility paradigm, expected utility can only be regarded as an approximation of actual behavior. A more realistic model is needed. This is particularly true when treating attitudes toward small probability events: the standard situation for insurable risks. Non-Expected Utility and Risk Management examines whether the existing results in insurance economics are robust to more general models of behavior under risk.

It is generally acknowledged that deterministic formulations of dy namical phenomena in the social sciences need to be treated differently from similar formulations in the natural sciences. Social science phe nomena typically defy precise measurements or data collection that are comparable in accuracy and detail to those in the natural sciences. Con sequently, a deterministic model is rarely expected to yield a precise description of the actual phenomenon being modelled. Nevertheless, as may be inferred from a study of the models discussed in this book, the qualitative analysis of deterministic models has an important role to play in understanding the fundamental mechanisms behind social sci ence phenomena. The reach of such analysis extends far beyond tech nical clarifications of classical theories that were generally expressed in imprecise literary prose. The inherent lack of precise knowledge in the social sciences is a fun damental trait that must be distinguished from "uncertainty. " For in stance, in mathematically modelling the stock market, uncertainty is a prime and indispensable component of a model. Indeed, in the stock market, the rules are specifically designed to make prediction impossible or at least very difficult. On the other hand, understanding concepts such as the "business cycle" involves economic and social mechanisms that are very different from the rules of the stock market. Here, far from seeking unpredictability, the intention of the modeller is a scientific one, i. e."