This note is concerned with qualitative restrictions on individual binary preferences of decision makers over profiles of individual actions to account for intersubjective sensitivity to welfare, or preferences, of others, when numerical representations by utility functions fail, due to...

A review essay of : T. Cozzi, R. Marchionatti (eds), Piero Sraffa’s Political Economy, London: Routledge, 2001 ; M. Pivetti (ed.), Piero SraVa. Contributi per una biografia intellettuale, Roma : Carocci, 2000 ; H. D. Kurz (ed.), Critical Essays on Piero Sraffa’s Legacy in Economics,...

If consumption takes time, then a time constraint may reduce the consumer's freedom when buying goods. Some implications of Steedman's approach are examined in this paper; some variations on the theme are considered and compared. Finally, the notion of time as a context may lead to developments...

The so called “socio-technical transitions” is driven by actors such as firms and industries, policy makers and politicians, consumers, civil society, engineers and researchers. This paper addresses the role of consumers in the transition process and their interaction with the established...

We develop a model of persuasion where, consistent with the psychological literature on dual process theory, the persuadee has to sustain a cognitive effort - the elaboration cost - in order to fully and precisely elaborate information. The persuader makes an offer to the persuadee and, aware...

Latin American countries experienced important changes over the last decade. The implementation of fiscal reforms, public debt reduction and the high level of accumulated reserves gave them more policy space than in the past. As a result, Latin American countries were able to implement...

Without the passions there would be little reason to act at all. Nevertheless, in standard economic models human action is driven solely by self-interest: the passions are supposed to interfere with our ability to form rational beliefs and to make rational choices. In fact, any action originated...

Real markets can be naturally represented as networks, and they share with other social networks the fundamental property of sparsity, whereby agents are connected by l = O (n) relationships. The exponential networks model introduced by Park and Newman can be extended in order to deal with this...

Areeda and Turner (1975) were the first to argue that a price below marginal costs should be considered a sign of predation. Recognizing that marginal cost data were typically unavailable, the authors concluded that a price below average variable cost should be presumed unlawful. This so-called...

We review the burgeoning literature on two-sided markets focusing on the different definitions that have been proposed. In particular, we show how the well-known definition given by Evans is a particular case of the more general definition proposed by Rochet and Tirole. We then identify the...