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Books > Business & Economics > Economics > Microeconomics
This volume brings together papers inspired by the work of Duncan Foley, an extraordinarily productive economist who has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of areas. Foley's work cannot be easily classified, but one thread that runs through it is a critical examination (along both ethical and analytical lines) of conventional neoclassical economic theory, particularly involving general equilibrium theories of value and money. Foley was a pioneer of complexity economics as well, which adopts approaches to these questions drawn from natural sciences, so the collection therefore has an interdisciplinary quality that will interest a wide variety of readers. Some of the chapters are intellectual biographies that contextualize and identify Foley's contributions to Keynesian macroeconomics, Marxian value theory, and complexity theory in economics. The topics covered include the economics of complexity; the ethics of general equilibrium theory; the economics of climate change; applications of Keynesian, Marxian and Ricardian political economy; and money and financial crises. The collection should be useful to scholars who work in various economic traditions critical of the currently dominant free-market approach, but it also speaks to scholars of critical theory in various disciplines beyond economics such as the mathematicians, physicists, and other natural scientists who are interested in understanding the complexity of social processes using their analytical frameworks. This book should also appeal to graduate students in economics who are working in these traditions, as well as scholars (including current graduate students in orthodox programs) who are dissatisfied with the current state of economic theory and would like to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by sampling the contributions of critical theorists.
Traditional game theory requires at least two individuals. This book extends game theory to the inner workings of a single person. Using game theory to analyse single individuals makes sense if one thinks of individuals as consisting of two or more relatively autonomous partitions that might have conflicting motives. This is not to say that individuals are literally made up from multiple selves; it only suffices that we adopt a portrayal of the individual as a multilayered entity or of a dual nature, in a manner similar to Adam Smith's depiction of an "impartial spectator" existing within the individual, The notion that individuals may be considered as collections of distinct partitions or "sub-selves" has been challenging writers from diverse fields for many centuries. This book breaks new ground in combining psychological with evolutionary game theory, making for a highly promising way towards a better understanding of the individual and the development of their behaviour, along with the individual's own perceptions on it.
The substantial prosperity that characterizes market economies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is relatively recent in human history. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, economic progress was so slow that people would not have been able to recognize it in their lifetimes, whereas today, economic progress is so much a part of people's lives that they take it for granted. In this new volume, Randall G. Holcombe argues that economic analysis, as it developed through the twentieth century, relies heavily on concepts of economic equilibrium, and is not descriptive of the dynamic real-world economy that is characterized by economic progress. Even in dynamic settings, economic models focus on income growth, leaving out the entrepreneurial forces that generate economic progress, resulting in the introduction of new goods and services and new production processes. Economic analysis focuses on the forces that lead to an economic equilibrium, not the forces that produce prosperity. This characterization of economic analysis describes a substantial component of economics as it has developed over the past century. However, there are also economists who have analyzed the factors that lead to an entrepreneurial and innovative economy, generating progress rather than equilibrium. This volume does not question the value of past research, but argues that, looking ahead, economics should build on its past to focus on factors that create an entrepreneurial and innovative economy that is characterized by progress and prosperity. This would make economic analysis more consistent with the remarkable progress and prosperity that characterizes the modern economy. This volume lays out a framework for economic analysis that consistently incorporates the real-world factors that produce prosperity.
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.
This book offers extensive and quality research on and original insights into China's internal regional dynamics. It provides a focused analysis of the internal dynamics and regional economic diversity of China covering the eastern, central and western regions through case study, data analysis and review of state-initiated policy measures. The book also identifies and analyses existing and potential challenges facing China's regions in their pursuit of sustainable development. Different regions in China have attempted to achieve fast economic growth and move up the industrial value chain through industrial restructuring and upgrading, inter-regional industrial transfer, urbanization or seeking central government's endorsement of new regional policies. The book examines the difference and similarities among local government policies to boost regional industrial and economic growth and assesses their implications and effectiveness. The author had conducted detailed studies in this field in order to bridge the existing research gap and the book will help to give rise to useful and illuminating discussion.
This is a major study of economic policy making in Britain between the wars. It provided the first full-length analysis of the early development of fiscal policy as a tool of modern economic management. The central question addressed is how Keynesian fiscal policies came to be adopted by the British government, with particular attention paid to the role of the Treasury and to that of Keynes himself. Drawing extensively on unpublished documents hitherto untapped by economists or historians, Roger Middleton challenges the widely held view of official economic thinking as an ill-informed group of people holding 'the Treasury view' in opposition to Keynes's prescriptions for deficient demand and mass unemployment. Instead he argues that acceptance of Keynesian economics during the Second World War resulted from political and administrative factors as much as a conversion to Keynesian theory. He investigates the form and impact of fiscal policy during the 1930s and, through a constant employment budget analysis, shows convincingly that at times of rising unemployment governments ignore at their peril the effects of automatic stabilizers upon budgetary stability. Historians and economists welcomed this fresh perspective on a debate of historical as well as contemporary importance. Towards the Managed Economy is essential reading for all those interested in the rise and fall of Keynesian demand management. This classic text was first published in 1985.
At the time in which this book was first published in 1992, there was a major concern with the macro-economic implications of fiscal imbalance. As the European economies moved closer to monetary union, and Germany grappled with the fiscal pressures of unification, deficits in the United States exceeded $300 billion. In this volume the authors address this issue, using both historical case-studies and cross-national comparisons. This book will be of interest to students of economics.
This book explains how three major mechanisms of globalization international trade, international migration, and the activities of multinational companies have altered working conditions and labor rights around the world during the late 20th century. Drawing on analyses of a database on international labor conditions assembled for this project and a growing research literature on globalization and labor conditions, the book finds that trade, migration, and multinational companies are associated with improvements in world labor conditions.
This volume explores the well-documented phenomena of memory distortion in a variety of settings, as well as how it can be ameliorated or prevented altogether. The editors have recruited some of the very best researchers in the applied cognitive field to address these issues. These authors examine distortion from several angles: fuzzy trace theory, face identification, memory deficits with age, collaborative influences on distortion, sociocultural influences on memory, retention of procedural and declarative information, and ignorance of medical and other information. The final chapter addresses the issue of cognitive technology, in general. Because of the surge of interest in applied cognitive psychology and in the memory distortion issue in particular, this book will be valuable to many applied and basic researchers.
This EMEA adaptation of Thomas Nechyba's popular text presents a European, Middle East and African perspective, whilst also being fully updated. This exciting new edition follows Professor Nechyba's five primary goals for any microeconomics course by presenting the subject as a way of looking at the world, showing students how and why the world works, how to think more clearly and develop conceptual thinking skills, and by providing a flexible learning style and a roadmap for further study. Each chapter follows the A and B structure developed by Professor Nechyba, allowing students to explore an intuitive approach in Part A and then focus on how the intuitive approach can be represented mathematically in Part B. This edition is also available as a MindTap with additional assessments, a Graph Builder and video graph presentations. It is also available with Aplia, a comprehensive online learning assessment tool with autograded randomised questions to test students' understanding.
Privacy, Due process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology engages with the rapidly developing computational aspects of our world including data mining, behavioural advertising, iGovernment, profiling for intelligence, customer relationship management, smart search engines, personalized news feeds, and so on in order to consider their implications for the assumptions on which our legal framework has been built. The contributions to this volume focus on the issue of privacy, which is often equated with data privacy and data security, location privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, unobservability, and unlinkability. Here, however, the extent to which predictive and other types of data analytics operate in ways that may or may not violate privacy is rigorously taken up, both technologically and legally, in order to open up new possibilities for considering, and contesting, how we are increasingly being correlated and categorizedin relationship with due process - the right to contest how the profiling systems are categorizing and deciding about us.
Summarizing the facts about the prevailing sizes of industrial firms or plants and the patterns of industrial location in Britain and America, this book also interprets the facts in basic terms such as technical requirements and consumer habits. Examining investment and human resource management, the contrasts and (unexpected) similarities in the industrial structure and government of the two countries are analysed. The book includes new research into the real seat of power in the British joint stock company and compares the results with the realities of the American corporation.
Covering issues as pertinent today as when the book was first published, The Logic of Industrial Organization discusses key themes in industrial relations, manufacturing, employment and investment and education for business administration. The book contains chapters on the following: The Structure of Industry; The Efficiency of Large-Scale Operation; Planned and Free Consumption; Forecasting and Market Research; Competition; Rationalization and Nationalization; Investment and Employment; Incentives to Work and Mobility; Stimulus to Enterprise and Administration.
This book is a key example of the emergence of public choice theory by an economist who was to become one of its major exponents. It combines a detailed, critical study of the Monopolies Commission, with an analysis of the economic issues involved in monopoly supervision and control.
This unique and inexpensive book provides a demographic and economic history of urban America over the last 65 years. The growth and decline of most northern cities is contrasted with the steady growth of western and southern cities. Various urban government policies are explored, including federal, state, and local policies. There is a chapter focusing on Detroit and its rapid decline toward bankruptcy and its recent strategies to slow recovery. The final two chapters speculate on what's next for urban America and gives suggestions for stimulating growth.
This unique and inexpensive book provides a demographic and economic history of urban America over the last 65 years. The growth and decline of most northern cities is contrasted with the steady growth of western and southern cities. Various urban government policies are explored, including federal, state, and local policies. There is a chapter focusing on Detroit and its rapid decline toward bankruptcy and its recent strategies to slow recovery. The final two chapters speculate on what's next for urban America and gives suggestions for stimulating growth.
The most innovative feature of the book is its extensive coverage of recent research in behavioral and experimental economics. This research not only documents behavior inconsistent with some elements of traditional theory but also advances positive theories with superior predictive power. The research covered includes studies of loss aversion, reference-dependent preferences, the context and framing of choice, hyperbolic discounting and inconsistent intertemporal choice, predictable errors in updating probabilities, nonlinear weighting of probabilities, and prospect theory. The importance of this material was highlighted by the Swedish Academy of Sciences when it awarded the 2002 Prize in Economic Sciences to Daniel Kahneman (a psychologist who helped lay the foundations of behavioral economics) and Vernon Smith (an experimental economist). Although the topics are "advanced" in the sense that they are near the frontier of economic research and seldom-covered in textbooks, they are readily comprehended because they center on simple controlled experiments and relate to everyday concerns. Covering results from behavioral and experimental economics along with traditional microeconomic doctrine involves re-balancing three key components of economics: issues, theory, and data. Traditional introductions emphasize issues, sketch theory, and use data only to illustrate theory. More advanced texts traditionally focus on theory, relegating issues and data to asides. Any data in traditional texts are usually from observational (non-experimental) studies. The relationship between theory and observational data is likely to be ambiguous until probed by advanced econometric methods and may remain so even then. Recognizing that few students have the econometric skills needed for serious analysis of observational data, some authors focus their texts almost exclusively on theory and issues. Although widely used, such texts discomfort students and professors to whom data-free exposition smells of indoctrination. In comparison to traditional texts, this book places more emphasis on experimental data, both when they support received theory and when they reveal anomalies. Thus the book covers both feed-lot experiments that generate conventionally shaped isoquants and choice experiments that cast doubt on the predictive value of expected utility theory. The book presupposes nothing beyond high-school algebra and intellectual curiosity. It is intended for undergraduate classes and independent reading. Anyone writing for an audience that includes undergraduates must decide how to handle the growing gap between the rudimentary mathematical skills acquired in secondary schools, particularly in the United States, and the growing mathematical prerequisites for reading economists' professional journals. This gap must somehow be bridged if undergraduates are to be prepared for employment or graduate study in economics and related fields. To be fully prepared, students need not only classes in mathematics but also practice in formulating and solving quantitative economic problems. Too many texts either omit such problems or assume that students come fully equipped to handle them. In contrast, this text offers many opportunities to apply high-school algebra in an economic context and to develop basic skills in linear programming and risk modeling. Through footnotes and parenthetical remarks, it also encourages readers to make good use of any calculus they know. Exercises appear where appropriate in the text; solutions and supplemental problems are collected at the ends of chapters. When teaching from the book, I usually start each class by asking students if they had trouble solving any problems in the previous chapter and end class by helping students tackle the problems in the current chapter. By solving the problems students can make appreciable progress toward becoming competent economists.
Understanding why so many people across the world are so poor is one of the central intellectual challenges of our time. This book provides the tools and data that will enable students, researchers and professionals to address that issue. Empirical Development Economics has been designed as a hands-on teaching tool to investigate the causes of poverty. The book begins by introducing the quantitative approach to development economics. Each section uses data to illustrate key policy issues. Part One focuses on the basics of understanding the role of education, technology and institutions in determining why incomes differ so much across individuals and countries. In Part Two, the focus is on techniques to address a number of topics in development, including how firms invest, how households decide how much to spend on their children's education, whether microcredit helps the poor, whether food aid works, who gets private schooling and whether property rights enhance investment. A distinctive feature of the book is its presentation of a range of approaches to studying development questions. Development economics has undergone a major change in focus over the last decade with the rise of experimental methods to address development issues; this book shows how these methods relate to more traditional ones. Please visit the book's website at www.empiricalde.com for online supplements including Stata files and solutions to the exercises.
The questions such as, why the focuses of national policies vary significantly across countries, although their sources of policies are to a great extent identical; why national development experiences mostly cannot be transplanted successfully among countries; why some ineffective institutions persist over long periods of time, have attracted numerous efforts. This book provides a new perspective and argues that the answers lie in the existence of the networks of institutions and thus of national systems of policies (NSP) within national frameworks. Institutions are the equilibria of games and exist as rules of games. Therefore, a basic setting is that institutions emerge endogenously from a series of social interactions, and the interacting human agents are connected and interdependent at the overlapping interaction platforms. National policies and developmental strategies can be modelled in this approach too. The networks of institutions describe the dynamic connected structure among institutions in the process of social interactions over time. Regarding the national policies response to the recent economic crises, this book argues that the difference comes from the distinct understandings of the tags of the policies, which highly depend on the distinct national contexts, such as national interests, cultural background, political systems and so forth. This book represents a significant contribution to the literature which will be essential reading for those interested in institutional economics, network theory, social structures and economic policy. In particular, the approach of applying network game theory in institutional emergence, and the terms developed, i.e. tags of institutions, and national systems of policies, in this book, are illuminating and deserve more attention."
Entrepreneurship and innovation are two of the most pervasive
concepts of our times, yet there are still gaps in our
understanding of the interactions between entrepreneurship and
innovation, particularly in developing countries. This book is an
attempt to fill this gap. It focuses on the
entrepreneurship-innovation-development nexus, drawing heavily on
empirical evidence from developing countries. Cross-country and
individual country experiences cover nations as diverse as
Ethiopia, India, Turkey, Vietnam, and also examine lessons from
advanced economies such as Finland.
This book presents the theory and practice of product lifecycle management, chiefly focusing on modern approaches suitable for digitalized enterprises. In addition to describing adaptive methods for advanced product creation using big data analytics, it presents economic and mathematical models for managing product lifecycles based on the application of recent methods (e.g. digital design and automated intelligent systems) to control pre-production and production processes. Given its scope, the book appeals to researchers, economic analysts and entrepreneurs alike.
Any experimental field consists of preparing special conditions for examining interesting objects for research. So naturally, the particular ways in which scientists prepare their objects determine the kind and the content of knowledge produced. This book provides a framework for the analysis of experimental practices - the Social Epistemology of Experiment - that incorporates both the material and the social dimensions of knowledge production. The Social Epistemology of Experiment is applied to experimental economics and in so doing, it introduces the epistemic role of the participation of human subjects in experiments and the causal efficacy of institutions in constraining and enabling human behaviour. It also develops the role of the social and socially established practices in overcoming the methodological difficulties associated with experimenting with humans subjects in the social sciences as well as the effect of scientists interventions in the laboratory worlds. This book provides an historical and contextualized account of the emergence of experimental economics, the methodological discussions that have informed and constituted it, its main research programmes, and stylized facts. The analysis of its three main research programmes market experiments, game theory experiments and individual decision-making experiments shows how economics experiments are particularly tailored to produce knowledge about market institutions and individual behaviour in contexts where there might be conflicts of individual and social goals, and also about the processes of individual decision-making."
This book investigates from the perspective of the major economic dictionaries the notions of economic crisis and cycles. It gives an extensive summary of a number of significant entries on this subject, with an introductory essay to each entry placing them (and the dictionary to which they belong) in their context, giving some details on the author of the dictionary entry, and assessing the entry s (and its author s) contribution. The broad picture (including the history of these encyclopedic tools) is examined in the introductory essays. Extra resources may be accessed at the author's personal website: http: //www.danielebesomi.ch/dictionaries/crises_in_dictionaries/index.html "
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.
This collection of 22 commissioned essays from scholars across numerous fields responded to the question: What are the most fundamental things you can say concerning the interrelations between the institutions of government and property? Contributing authors were asked to address this question in a positive analysis and that their essay penetrate to the deepest (most fundamental) levels of property-government organization. Their contributions are illuminating. |
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