Industrial Price, Quantity, and Productivity Indices: The Micro-Economic Theory and an Application gives a comprehensive account of the micro-economic foundations of industrial price, quantity, and productivity indices. The various results available from the literature have been brought together into a consistent framework, based upon modern duality theory. This integration also made it possible to generalize several of these results. Thus, this book will be an important resource for theoretically as well as empirically-oriented researchers who seek to analyse economic problems with the help of index numbers. Although this book's emphasis is on micro-economic theory, it is also intended as a practical guide. A full chapter is therefore devoted to an empirical application. Three different approaches are pursued: a straightforward empirical approach, a non-parametric estimation approach, and a parametric estimation approach. As well as illustrating some of the more important concepts explored in this book, and showing to what extent different computational approaches lead to different outcomes for the same measures, this chapter also makes a powerful case for the use of enterprise micro-data in economic research.

A central problem of prescriptive decision making is the mismatch between the elegant formal models of decision theory and the less elegant, informal thinking of decision makers, especially when dealing with ill-structured situations. This problem has been a central concern of the authors and their colleagues over the past two decades. They have wisely (to my mind) realized that any viable solution must be informed by a deep understanding of both the structural properties of alternative formalisms and the cognitive demands that they impose on decision makers. Considering the two in parallel reduces the risk of forcing decision makers to say things and endorse models that they do not really understand. It opens the door for creative solutions, incorporating insights from both decision theory and cognitive psychology. It is this opportunity that the authors have so ably exploited in this important book. Under the pressures of an interview situation, people will often answer a question that is put to them. Thus, they may be willing to provide a decision consultant with probability and utility assessments for all manner of things. However, if they do not fully understand the implications of what they are saying and the use to which it will be put, then they cannot maintain cognitive mastery of the decision models intended to represent their beliefs and interests.

Most economic evaluations of health care programmes at the moment are cost effectiveness and cost-utility analyses. The problem with these methods is that their theoretical foundations are unclear. This has led to confusion about how to define the costs and health effects and how to interpret the results of these studies. In the environmental and traffic safety fields it is instead common to carry out traditional cost-bene: fit analyses of health improving programmes. This striking difference in how health programmes are assessed in different fields was the original motivation for writing this book. The aim of the book is to tty and provide a coherent framework within cost-bene: fit analysis and welfare economics for the different methods of economic evaluation in the health care field. The book is written in an easily accessible manner and several examples of applications of the different methods are provided. It is my hope that it will be useful both for teaching purposes and as a guide for practitioners in the field. Glenn C. Blomquist, John D. Graham, Rich O'Conor and four anonymous referees provided helpful comments on previous versions of the manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude to the following persons for helping me to prepare the manuscript: Carl-Magnus Berglund, Carin Blanksvard, Ann Brown, and Ziad Obeid."

Market Evolution: Competition and Cooperation is a selection of papers presented at the recent meeting of the European Association of Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE). The volume brings together twenty high-quality papers reflecting frontier research in modern industrial organization. The contributions cover a broad spectrum of increasing theoretical, empirical and policy issues, including analyses of the nature of the firm, product differentiation, research and development, strategic alliances, information sharing in the banking sector, exchange rate pass-through in international competition, labor unionization and product rivalry, buyer-supplier bargaining, multimarket competition and related entry, entry and exit processes, multinational enterprises in the Third World, European integration and the restructuring of Eastern Europe. From a theoretical perspective, many chapters apply game theory to the analysis of firm behaviors and market competition. Moreover, a large number of the studies contain a significant empirical part, mainly by employing econometric techniques, to test the hypotheses derived from modern industrial organization theories. Data from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the European Union are presented and analyzed.

G. Galeotti* and M. Marrelli** *Universita di Perugia **Universita di Napoli 1. The economic analysis of optimal taxation has permitted considerable steps to be taken towards the understanding of a number of problems: the appropriate degree of progression, the balance between different taxes, the equity-efficiency trade-off etc .. Though at times considered as abstract and of little use in policy design, the issues it addresses are real ones and very much on the agenda of many countries. As usual in scientific debate, criticisms have contributed to the correct understanding of the theoretical problems involved and made clear that, at the present state of the art, definitive conclusions may be premature. A first well-taken criticism addresses the assumption, underlying optimal taxation models, of a competitive economy with perfect information on the part of individual agents and full market clearing. Once we leave the Arrow-Debreu world, it is no longer necessarily the case that taxes and transfers introduce distortions on otherwise efficient allocations.

Positive conceptions of healthy aging are rightly displacing negative ageist perceptions of older members of our society. Nevertheless, at some stage, most elderly citizens will require some form of assistance from other members of society. When the body or mind begins to fail, a legitimate need for intervention and care will arise. This second volume on Aging discusses this theme.

In six chapters this book introduces a micro-economic model where trade takes place through a stable structure of bilateral exchange institutions.The main problem in such models is that, for well-known equilibrium concepts, equilibrium may fail to exist in the corresponding game. In this work an adaptation of such models - hierarchically structured economies - is introduced. The possibilities and limitations of the use of the concept of subgame perfect equilibrium within the context of this kind of models is discussed. Furthermore, it is shown that some well-known market forms, viz. Walrasian and monopolistic markets, occur as special cases. A modification of the concept of subgame perfect equilibrium is introduced to formulate and prove a general theorem on the existence of equilibrium in hierarchically structured economies.

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is the systematic and analytical process of comparing benefits and costs in evaluating the desirability of a project or programme - often of a social nature. It attempts to answer such questions as whether a proposed project is worthwhile, the optimal scale of a proposed project and the relevant constraints. CBA is fundamental to government decision making and is established as a formal technique for making informed decisions on the use of society's scarce resources. This timely sixth edition of the classic Cost-Benefit Analysis text continues to build on the successful approach of previous editions, with lucid explanation of key ideas, simple but effective expository short chapters and an appendix on various useful statistical and mathematical concepts and derivatives. The book examines important developments in the discipline, with relevant examples and illustrations as well as new and expanded chapters which build upon standard materials on CBA. Highlights include: updated historical background of CBA extended non-market goods valuation methods the impact of uncertainty evaluation of programmes and services behavioural economics decision rules and heuristics CBA and regulatory reforms CBA in developed and developing countries value of household production other topics frequently encountered in CBA, such as costs of diseases and air pollution, and value of statistical life. This book is a valuable source and guide to international funding agencies, governments, interested professional economists and senior undergraduate and graduate students. The text is fully supported by a companion website, which includes discussion questions and PowerPoint slides for each chapter.

This book is devoted to investment decision-making under uncertainty. The book covers three basic approaches to this process: the stochastic dominance approach; the mean-variance approach; and the non-expected utility approach, focusing on prospect theory and its modified version, cumulative prospect theory. Each approach is discussed and compared. In addition, this volume examines cases in which stochastic dominance rules coincide with the mean-variance rule and considers how contradictions between these two approaches may occur.

Provides a conceptual set of tools for how to approach environmental issues in a rigorous and thoughtful manner, based on an analysis of incentives, property rights, market failure, supply and demand constraints, and insights from behavioral economics. Easy-to-read and filled with real-world examples of the most complex environmental challenges, ""this book demonstrates that sound economic analysis and reasoning can be one of the environmental community's strongest allies.

Chapters in Game Theory has been written on the occasion of the 65th birthday of Stef Tijs, who can be regarded as the godfather of game theory in the Netherlands. The contributors all are indebted to Stef Tijs, as former Ph.D. students or otherwise. The book contains fourteen chapters on a wide range of subjects. Some of these can be considered surveys while other chapters present new results: most contributions can be positioned somewhere in between these categories. The topics covered include: cooperative stochastic games; noncooperative stochastic games; sequencing games; games arising form linear (semi-) infinite programming problems; network formation, costs and potential games; potentials and consistency in transferable utility games; the nucleolus and equilibrium prices; population uncertainty and equilibrium selection; cost sharing; centrality in social networks; extreme points of the core; equilibrium sets of bimatrix games; game theory and the market; and transfer procedures for nontransferable utility games. Both editors did their Ph.D with Stef Tijs, while he was affiliated with the mathematics department of the University of Nijmegen.

Provides a conceptual set of tools for how to approach environmental issues in a rigorous and thoughtful manner, based on an analysis of incentives, property rights, market failure, supply and demand constraints, and insights from behavioral economics. Easy-to-read and filled with real-world examples of the most complex environmental challenges, " "this book demonstrates that sound economic analysis and reasoning can be one of the environmental community's strongest allies.

Globalization affects regional economies in a broad spectrum of aspects, from labor market conditions and development policies to climate change. This volume, written by an international cast of eminent regional scientists, provides new tools for analyzing the enormous changes in regional economies due to globalization. It offers timely conceptual refinements for regional analysis.

The European Commission and its member states, along with many others, are wrestling with the problem of how to implement the scheduled liberalization of the postal sector while maintaining the universal service obligation. This book addresses some of these concerns. It is comprised of original essays chosen from among several dozen presented at the 13th Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics, which was held in Antwerp, Belgium, in June, 2005.

This volume offers a snapshot of the research that is ongoing in the area of value transfer. It provides relevant input for increasing the quality of cost-benefit analyses of projects with environmental and health impacts. The volume includes papers by some of the most influential authors in the area and covers the latest developments in the field.

The standard rationality hypothesis is that behaviour can be represented as the maximization of a suitably restricted utility function. This hypothesis lies at the heart of a large body of recent work in economics, of course, but also in political science, ethics, and other major branches of the social sciences. Though this hypothesis of utility maximization deserves our continued respect, finding further refinements and developing new critiques remain areas of active research. In fact, many fundamental conceptual problems remain unsettled. Where others have been resolved, their resolutions may be too recent to have achieved widespread understanding among social scientists. Last but not least, a growing number of papers attempt to challenge the rationality hypothesis head on, at least in its more orthodox formulation. The main purpose of this Handbook is to make more widely available some recent developments in the area. Yet we are well aware that the final chapter of a handbook like this can never be written as long as the area of research remains active, as is certainly the case with utility theory. The editors originally selected a list of topics that seemed ripe enough at the time that the book was planned. Then they invited contributions from researchers whose work had come to their attention. So the list of topics and contributors is largely the editors' responsibility, although some potential con tributors did decline our invitation. Each chapter has also been refereed, and often significantly revised in the light of the referees' remarks."

General Equilibrium Analysis is a systematic exposition of the Walrasian model of economic equilibrium with a finite number of agents, as formalized by Arrow, Debreu and McKenzie at the beginning of the fifties and since then extensively used, worked and studied. Existence and optimality of general equilibrium are developed repeatedly under different sets of hypothesis which define some general settings and delineate different approaches to the general equilibrium existence problem. The final chapter is devoted to the extension of the general equilibrium model to economies defined on an infinite dimensional commodity space.

The objective of General Equilibrium Analysis is to give to each problem in each framework the most general solution, at least for the present state of art. The intended readers are graduate students, specialists and researchers in economics, especially in mathematical economics. The book is appropriate as a class text, or for self-study.

This book makes available for the first time in English a substantial part of Otto Neurath's economic writings. The essays and small monographs translated here extend from his student years to his last ever finished piece. They chart not only Neurath's varied interests in the economic history of antiquity, in war economics and schemes for the socialisation of peacetime economies, in the theory of welfare measures and social indicators and in issues of the theory of collective choice, but also show his philosophical interests emerging in his contributions to seminal debates of the German Social Policy Association. This volume shows that Neurath's important contributions to the socialist calculation debate are but one aspect of a many-sided and original oeuvre. The translations are preceded by an introductory essay by one of the editors which contextualises the selections by locating them in the various debates of the time that provided their original setting.

This book is of interest to economists, philosophers of social science and of economics as well as to historians of philosophy of science and of analytic philosophy.

This book covers the main topics of welfare economics - general equilibrium models of exchange and production, Pareto optimality, un certainty, externalities and public goods - and some of the major topics of social choice theory - compensation criteria, fairness, voting. Arrow's Theorem, and the theory of implementation. The underlying question is this: "Is a particular economic or voting mechanism good or bad for society?" Welfare economics is mainly about whether the market mechanism is good or bad; social choice is largely about whether voting mechanisms, or other more abstract mechanisms, can improve upon the results of the market. This second edition updates the material of the first, written by Allan Feldman. It incorporates new sections to existing first-edition chapters, and it includes several new ones. Chapters 4, 6, 11, 15 and 16 are new, added in this edition. The first edition of the book grew out of an undergraduate welfare economics course at Brown University. The book is intended for the undergraduate student who has some prior familiarity with microeconomics. However, the book is also useful for graduate students and professionals, economists and non-economists, who want an overview of welfare and social choice results unburdened by detail and mathematical complexity. Welfare economics and social choice both probably suffer from ex cessively technical treatments in professional journals and monographs."

Changing preferencesis a phenomenonoften invoked but rarely properlyaccounted for. Throughout the history of the social sciences, researchers have come against the possibility that their subjects' preferenceswere affected by the phenomenato be explainedor by otherfactorsnot taken into accountin the explanation.Sporadically, attempts have been made to systematically investigate these in uences, but none of these seems to have had a lasting impact. Today we are still not much further with respect to preference change than we were at the middle of the last century. This anthology hopes to provide a new impulse for research into this important subject. In particular, we have chosen two routes to amplify this impulse. First, we stress the use of modellingtechniquesfamiliar from economicsand decision theory. Instead of constructing complex, all-encompassing theories of preference change, the authors of this volume start with very simple, formal accounts of some possible and hopefully plausible mechanism of preference change. Eventually, these models may nd their way into larger, empirically adequate theories, but at this stage, we think that the most importantwork lies in building structure.Secondly, we stress the importance of interdisciplinary exchange. Only by drawing together experts from different elds can the complex empirical and theoretical issues in the modelling of preference change be adequately investigated.

The book provides an up-to-date analytical and empirical treatment of some important interactions between paid and unpaid labour and the social economy. The emphasis on the motivations for paid and unpaid labour, and on how these factors contribute to efficiently providing social services, gives a clear empirical counterpart to the concept of social economy. The book begins with a theoretical perspective on the development and characteristics of paid and unpaid labour in social services. Several empirical analyses, largely using novel data sets, are then provided about these phenomena in Italy, a country which has drawn broad international attention in this field, as well as in other European countries and in the US. Topics of particular interest include: preferences regarding and satisfaction with paid and unpaid labour; ownership structure and risk; ownership structure, remuneration and incentives for paid labour; characteristics of volunteer labour and its relationship with social capital endowment across Italian regions; and a comparative analysis of labour in the nonprofit sector across Europe.

Europeans are living longer, and fewer now remain in the labour force as they grow older. Many European countries have responded to the ensuing financial pressure by reforming their public pension systems and health care programmes. There is considerable uncertainty as to the effects of these reforms - as they typically do not alter the unfunded nature of public welfare arrangements and this uncertainty is itself costly. Not only does it undermine the credibility of public welfare programmes, but it may also distort labour supply behaviour, decisions regarding savings and capital accumulation. More generally there is uncertainty about the overall impact of ageing on welfare and society and the multiple domains in which its effects may develop. Pensions: More Information, Less Ideology builds on the existing evidence - mostly in the field of public pensions - and highlights the advantages that would be obtained by: harmonising methodologies used in the various countries to report pension outlays and forecast future pension liabilities or more generally public spending; defining common standards as to the frequency of expenditure forecasts and the length of the forecast horizons for welfare expenditures; developing European longitudinal survey of persons pre- and post retirement age, providing timely information on a wide array of decisions by individuals and household related to the ageing process and the ongoing trends.

This book provides a systematic review of those economic approaches for valuing the environment and natural resources that use information on what people do, not what they say. The authors have worked on models of revealed preferences for valuing environmental and natural resources for several decades. The book provides a candid review of the major conceptual challenges and an exploration of neglected issues in the literature.

Alexander Dolgin's Economics of Symbolic Exchange is in reality not one but three books, and although these semantic layers are interlinked, the reader will need to choose between the different vectors and modalities. One clearly evident dimension is research. Certain authors introduce quite new intellectual approaches into scienti?c debate. This requires a special frame of mind and a searching curiosity about social reality. Carl Gustav Jung identi?ed a p- nomenon which he called systematic blindness: when a science reaches a stage of maturity and equilibrium, it categorically refuses, from a sense of self-preservation, to note certain facts and phenomena which it ?nds inconvenient. In Alexander D- gin's book whole complexes of such "non-canonical" material are to be found. Here are just a few examples: ?le exchange networks, through which digital works of art are spread through the Internet; bargain sales of fashionable clothing; the paradox of equal pricing of cultural goods of varying quality; and a discussion of whether - tronage or business has the more productive in?uence on creativity. Obviously, not all the issues Volginraises are totally new, but brought togetherand examinedwithin an elegant logical framework of informational economics, they pose a challenge to scienti?c thinking. Such challenges are by no means immediately or, in some cases, ever acclaimed bythescienti?cestablishment. J. K. Galbraith, forexample, agreatAmericaneco- mist, whose works are read throughout the world, who introduced a whole range of crucially important concepts, the director of John F.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) has had risk as a research topic on its agenda right from its inception in 1972. Risk has played a - jor role in the Energy Program, with research being carried out both in-house and in cooperationwith other internationalinstitutions like the InternationalAtomic - ergy Agency (IAEA) and national research centers. Research areas were primarily the evaluationof all possible risks within one categoryof energysupply like nuclear ?ssion or fusion or fossil fuels and, even more important, the comparisonof risks of different energy-supplystrategies. Later on an independent program was started which still exists today under the name Risk and Vulnerability. There is a large amount of literature on risks to which IIASA's research programs have contributed signi?cantly over the years, and there is, of course, an abundance of published work on international negotiations, part of which is a result of the work of the Processes of International Negotiation (PIN) Program. There are, however, so far no studies on the combination of these two strands. Therefore, and as research on both topics is housed at IIASA, we are happy that our PIN Program has undertaken the dif?cult and important task of analyzing what the editors of this book have called negotiated risks.