"Microeconomic Theory Old and New: A Student's Guide" has two main goals. The first is to give advanced undergraduate and graduate students an understanding of the core model of economics: Walrasian general equilibrium theory. The text presents in detail the three building blocks of Walrasian theory--establishing Pareto efficiency in a barter economy, establishing the efficiency of competitive markets, and accounting for market failure. Each is discussed verbally, graphically, and using mathematics. After reading this book, students will have an understanding of how the seemingly disparate pieces of conventional economics fit together as a system. Although the text focuses on the intellectual framework of standard economic theory, relevant mathematical techniques are discussed.
The second goal is to present contemporary extensions and emerging alternatives to the Walrasian model. Some of the theoretical inconsistencies in the model are presented, drawing on the work of Samuelson, Boadway, Chipman and Moore, Ng, and Suzamura, among others. The text then presents challenges to the basic assumptions of the Walrasian system, posed by findings in behavioral economics and evolutionary game theory.
Understanding both the Walrasian system and the theoretical and experimental critiques of classical economics is essential to those who ultimately work within the traditional framework and to those looking for an alternative, making this a must read for all students of economics.

"Microeconomic Theory Old and New: A Student's Guide" has two main goals. The first is to give advanced undergraduate and graduate students an understanding of the core model of economics: Walrasian general equilibrium theory. The text presents in detail the three building blocks of Walrasian theory--establishing Pareto efficiency in a barter economy, establishing the efficiency of competitive markets, and accounting for market failure. Each is discussed verbally, graphically, and using mathematics. After reading this book, students will have an understanding of how the seemingly disparate pieces of conventional economics fit together as a system. Although the text focuses on the intellectual framework of standard economic theory, relevant mathematical techniques are discussed.
The second goal is to present contemporary extensions and emerging alternatives to the Walrasian model. Some of the theoretical inconsistencies in the model are presented, drawing on the work of Samuelson, Boadway, Chipman and Moore, Ng, and Suzamura, among others. The text then presents challenges to the basic assumptions of the Walrasian system, posed by findings in behavioral economics and evolutionary game theory.
Understanding both the Walrasian system and the theoretical and experimental critiques of classical economics is essential to those who ultimately work within the traditional framework and to those looking for an alternative, making this a must read for all students of economics.

Originally published as a French edition in 1991, and first translated into English for this Cambridge edition in 2004, in this exhaustive study Christian Bidard develops a theory of prices of production. This theory breaks down the symmetry between producers and consumers and gives more importance to reproduction rather than scarcity. In his analysis of multiple-product systems, Bidard focuses on the notion of an all-engaging system which elucidates the link with von Neumann's theory; examines the notions of sector and vertical integration which make possible an elegant treatment of fixed capital; clarifies the status of the internal rate of return; proposes a general theory of rent. In the discussion of capital theory and marginal equalities or, more specifically, the treatment of exhaustible resources, Bidard compares different readings of Sraffa's work and revisits the question of relationships between classical theory (Smith, Ricardo, Marx) and the general equilibrium theory (Walras, Arrow, Debreu).

Traditional microeconomic theory has much to offer a manager. It suggests ways to increase profits by setting prices and packaging services, using advertising to increase demand and shows how internet auction sites like eBay affect competition and profitability. By using game theory to present and solve a manager s decision-making problems and by focusing on the strategic nature of these problems, this text makes microeconomic theory much more intuitive and relevant for the business student.

The text is separated into four sections:

• basic microeconomic theory of the firm and the basic tools of game theory
• problems related to the strategic interaction between firms, including price and quantity competition and product differentiation
• issues arising from strategic interactions within the firm, including vertical and horizontal integration, training and motivating workers, and labour unions
• marketing economics including information problems, advertising, durable goods and the product life cycle.

This book will be suitable for any student with a background of introductory economics. The authors include a variety of international examples and case studies from the business world to expand and illustrate key concepts, and provide end-of-chapter exercises to test students grasp of the material. An online supplement comprising of problems and solutions as well as PowerPoint slides is available for lecturers.

The Middle East is at an unprecedented crossroads between the established Euro-centric system and the emerging Asian powerhouses like India and China. Their economies, policies and social structures are a half-way-house between these two dominant groups and are an important case study to examine in order to highlight future prospects and problems of the global system. The Middle East is an important missing piece in a huge global puzzle. This book makes a significant step towards understanding that puzzle and offers solutions for how to fully integrate this missing jigsaw piece into the global economic system. Analytical Peace Economics: The Illusion of War for Peace focuses on three critical issues in the Middle East that dominate discussions about their place in the global political economy: conflict, oil and (regional) development. Examining economic and social development in juxtaposition with conflict and peace, this book adapts, develops and applies historical, geographical, economic and psychological methods, creating a nuanced approach to the collective understanding of the economic and social dynamics in the region. By developing theoretical models and analysing empirical research, this book offers an economic analysis of the attempt to find peace through war and seeks to find alternative solutions. This book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and doctoral students of economics, finance and social sciences as well as advanced undergraduate students of peace economics and development studies.

Pension fund benefits are crucial for pensioners' welfare and pension fund savings have accumulated to huge amounts, covering a major part of world-wide institutional investments. However, the literature on pension fund economics and finance is rather limited, caused, in part, to limited data availability. This book contributes to this literature and focuses on three important areas. The first is pension fund (in)efficiency, which has a huge impact on final benefits, particularly when annual spoilage accumulates over a lifetime. Scale economies, pension plans complexity and alternative pension saving plans are important issues. The second area is investment behavior and risk-taking. A key question refers to the allocation of investments over high risk/high return and relatively safe assets. Bikker investigates whether pension funds follow the life-cycle hypothesis: more risk and return for pension funds with young participants. Many pension funds are rather limited in size, which may raise the question how financially sophisticated the pension fund decision makers are: rather professionals or closer to unskilled private persons? The third field concerns two regulation issues. How do pension fund respond to shocks such as unexpected investment returns or changes in life expectancy? What are the welfare implications to the beneficiary for different methods of securing pension funding: solvency requirements, a pension guarantee fund, or sponsor support? This groundbreaking book will challenge the way pension fund economics is thought about and practiced.

Within the economist's abstraction of a "Perfect Market" it is assumed that all agents have access to the same timely, accurate and free information, and as a result allocative efficiency will be achieved. In practice this rarely happens and in most cases agents have access to different levels of information so that transactions are characterized by asymmetric information. This book presents the first integrated treatment of asymmetric information as both a macroeconomic and microeconomic phenomenon in financial markets.

Electricity is an essential commodity traded at power exchanges. Its price is very volatile within a day and over the year. This raises questions about the efficiency of the trading rules. The author develops a non-cooperative auction model analyzing the bidding behavior of producers at power exchanges. Producers are limited by the production capacity of their power plants. Production costs are affiliated. This allows for independence or positive correlation. The author analyzes and compares a uniform-price, a discriminatory, and a generalized second-price auction. Optimal bids, cost efficiency, profits, and consumer prices are examined. A simple probability density function of affiliated production costs is given and used for examples. Numerical results are presented. The results of the analysis can help improving the bidding strategies of producers, selecting the best auction type at power exchanges or detecting price manipulations.

Information technology (IT) has become a constant presence in contemporary life, infiltrating community, business and state affairs. This book discusses applications and consequences of IT in developing and advanced countries, focusing on the ways in which IT has changed society via the so-called Internet revolution. It examines the characteristics of network economies; Internet access; changes in supply chains; productivity increases; and the digital divide. It ranges through the U.K., European Union, Central and Eastern Europe, U.S., Japan, India, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and China.

Key to China's plans to promote rural development is the de-marginalisation of the countryside through the incorporation of rural areas into the urban-based market-oriented financial system. For this reason, Chinese development planners have turned to microcredit -- i.e. the provision of small-scale loans to 'financially excluded' rural households -- as a means of increasing 'financial consciousness' and facilitating rural de-marginalisation. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in rural China, this book examines the formulation, implementation and outcomes of government-run microcredit programmes in China-illuminating the diverse roles that microcredit plays in local processes of socioeconomic development and the livelihoods of local actors. It details how microcredit facilitates de-marginalisation for some, while simultaneously exacerbating the marginalisation of others; and exposes the ways in which microcredit and other top-down development strategies reflect and reinforce the contradictions and paradoxes implicit in rural China's contemporary development landscape.

One area in which Loewenstein has made a major contribution is in the analysis of how individual preferences are formed: whether they can be predicted and the extent to which they are influenced by emotion rather than reason. This volume presents a selection of his most influential papers with an introduction which provides an historical overview of the concept of preferences, summarizes his papers, and places them in the context of the literature.

The practical importance of auction theory is widely recognized. Indeed, economists have been recognized for their contribution to the design of several auction-like mechanisms, such as the U. S. Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions, the 3G auctions in Europe and beyond, and the auction markets for electricity markets around the world.
Moreover, auction theory is now seen as an important component of an economist's training. For example, some of the more celebrated results from the single-object auction theory are now usually taught in advanced undergraduate and first-year graduate courses on the economics of information. The techniques and insights gained from the study of auction theory provide a useful starting point for those who want to venture into the economics of information, mechanism design, and regulatory economics.
This book provides a step-by-step, self-contained treatment of the theory of auctions. The aim is to provide an introductory textbook that will allow students and readers with a calculus background to work through all the basic results. Coverage includes: the basic independent-private-model; the effects of introducing correlation in valuations on equilibrium behaviour and the seller's expected revenue; mechanism design; and the theory of multi-object auctions. The paperback edition of the text includes a new chapter which acts as a guide to current developments in auction theory.

Spatial Microeconometrics introduces the reader to the basic concepts of spatial statistics, spatial econometrics and the spatial behavior of economic agents at the microeconomic level. Incorporating useful examples and presenting real data and datasets on real firms, the book takes the reader through the key topics in a systematic way. The book outlines the specificities of data that represent a set of interacting individuals with respect to traditional econometrics that treat their locational choices as exogenous and their economic behavior as independent. In particular, the authors address the consequences of neglecting such important sources of information on statistical inference and how to improve the model predictive performances. The book presents the theory, clarifies the concepts and instructs the readers on how to perform their own analyses, describing in detail the codes which are necessary when using the statistical language R. The book is written by leading figures in the field and is completely up to date with the very latest research. It will be invaluable for graduate students and researchers in economic geography, regional science, spatial econometrics, spatial statistics and urban economics.

This is a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of the economic analysis of contracts written by a specially commissioned team of leading international scholars. The book offers a well structured analysis of theoretical developments, the diverse fields of applications, the methodologies in use, and the policy implications at both firm and state level. It offers a unique combination of theoretical and applied economics along with insights from law and management sciences. The volume is designed to appeal to scholars, graduate students and practitioners in economics, management and law.

Throughout the history of capitalism, street economy has found a space in the failures and externalities of the open market economy, but it has been derided or ignored in the mainstream media and academy. However, street economies are a solution, not a problem: popping up as a spontaneous solution to the failures of capitalism, these economies are an opportunity to learn, explore and grow away from the mainstream. Even though discussion of street economy and vendors is on the rise in recent years, the subject is still dealt with on the basis of sectors, cities and countries, not on a global scale. With the increase in the volume, types and functions of street activities, is has become more appealing for the wider population by including a wide variety of sectors. The studies in this volume of Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis investigate the causes and effects of new street-focused formations, such as NASVI in India, and SWG in ILO, established in response to the new legal regulation and organizational needs that have emerged with increasing employment volume in the street economy. For researchers and students of contemporary economics, interested in a global view on a rising industry, this is a key exploration of how micro businesses play on the global level.

This book examines the origins, development and reasons for change of the first Soviet economic system. Programmes are compared with outcomes and theory with practice in the fields of nationalization, workers??? control and management, money and planning, industrial organization and food procurement. The organization of military supply and industry is examined separately, to emphasize that the initial approach to economic organization was affected not only by external events, but also by ideology, class struggle and social pressures. The economic and social analysis, which lay behind policy-making, was often distorted by prejudice, and the economic system, which emerged was the result of efforts to replace market relations by administrative measures. Unexpected and unwanted outcomes induced some leaders to rethink initial policies, while others continued to adhere to rigid programmes, even after the conclusion of civil war.

This is an examples-driven treatment of introductory economic dynamics for students with a basic familiarity of spreadsheets. Shone approaches the subject with the belief that true understanding of a subject can only be achieved by students themselves setting out a problem and manipulating it experimentally. Although all economics students now have access to spreadsheets, they are often used for little more than graphing economic data. This book encourages students to go several stages further and set up and investigate simple dynamic models. A web-site for students and instructors is included that contains an additional 100 questions for students and 100 for instructors.

Leading researchers examine child poverty in industrialized countries--the United States, UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, and Russia--in this major new study. Issues addressed are: definition and measurement in the dynamic analysis of child poverty; cross-national comparisons of child poverty rates and trends; cross-national comparisons of children's movements into and out of poverty; country-specific studies of child poverty dynamics; and the policy implications of taking a dynamic perspective. This unique study, with its cross-national and dynamic analysis of child poverty, will interest academics, international organizations, governments and their advisors.

This book is written for those seeking a decision theory appropriate for use in serious choices such as insurance. It employs stages of knowledge ahead to track satisfactions and dissatisfactions. From experimental and questionnaire data, people take into account such stages of knowledge ahead satisfactions and dissatisfactions. This means we must go beyond standard decision theories like expected utility or cumulative prospect theory.

In this textbook, governance aspects are presented and explained in a comprehensible way at different levels: After a look at the roots of the governance discussion in economics and political science, political and economic negotiation and problem-solving processes are discussed on the macro level "Orders of Governance" and institutional and normative framework conditions are considered; on the meso level "Cooperation", forms of steering and control as well as cooperation and coordination of social economy enterprises are dealt with; and on the micro level "Interactions", governance is dealt with from the perspective of the actors and their interactions.

Time and Poverty in Western Welfare States is the English language adaptation of one of the most important contributions to welfare economics published in recent years. Professors Leibfried and Leisering offer a time-based (dynamic) analysis of the study of poverty, and suggest the need for a radical rethinking of conventional theoretical and policy approaches. Its methodology will make it of great interest to students and researchers in the social sciences, with particular importance for social policy and welfare economics.

Networks are fastest-growing components in most industries. Network industries include the Internet, e-mail, telephony, computer hardware and software, music and video players, and service operations in businesses overseas, banking, law, and airlines. Oz Shy conveys the essential features of how strategic interactions among firms are affected by network activity, and how social interaction influences consumers' choices of products and services. Oz Shy is on the faculty of economics at the University of Haifa, in Haifa, Israel. His previous book is Industrial Organization: Theory and Applications (MIT Press, 1996).

Networks are fastest-growing components in most industries. Network industries include the Internet, e-mail, telephony, computer hardware and software, music and video players, and service operations in businesses overseas, banking, law, and airlines. Oz Shy conveys the essential features of how strategic interactions among firms are affected by network activity, and how social interaction influences consumers' choices of products and services. Oz Shy is on the faculty of economics at the University of Haifa, in Haifa, Israel. His previous book is Industrial Organization: Theory and Applications (MIT Press, 1996).

This book brings together two very disparate areas, economics and culture, considering both the economic aspects of cultural activity, and the cultural context of economics and economic behavior. The author discusses how cultural goods are valued in both economic and cultural terms, and introduces the concepts of cultural capital and sustainability. The book goes on to discuss the economics of creativity in the production of cultural goods and services; culture in economic development; the cultural industries; and cultural policy. An important topic analyzed in a stimulating and nontechnical style.

This is the first book of its kind to bring together the microeconomic insights on the functioning of non-profit organizations, complementing the wide range of books on the management of non-profit organizations by instead focusing on both theoretical and empirical work.

Jegers begins by considering definitions of non-profit organizations before examining the economic rationale behind their existence, the demand for them and its implications on their functioning. The final chapters look at the economic idiosyncrasies of the non-profit organizations, focusing on the fields of strategic management, marketing, accounting and finance.