It is shown that the thermodynamic law of conservation of mass, the so-called Materials-Balance-Principle, implies that the marginal product as well as the average product of a material resource input are bounded from above. This means that the Inada conditions, one of the standard assumptions...

The two notions of temporal and thermodynamic irreversibility are distinguished. It is shown that the irreversibility concept of Arrow-Debreu, while establishing temporal irreversibility, does not encompass thermodynamic irreversibility. This means, the standard irreversibility concept of...

Economies are open systems embedded in an ecosystem with which they exchange matter and energy. Interactions among these systems are vital for each system's performance and are constrained by the laws of physics. This volume pays tribute to economy--environment interactions simultaneously from...

Many environmental damages are caused by substances which come into existence as undesired joint outputs in the production of desired goods. Whether an output is desired or not, however, is not an inherent property of the substance itself but depends on the context of production. This book...

This book offers insights into recent research focusing on the interface between thermodynamics and economics. Although nonequilibrium thermodynamics and self-organisation appear to offer more exciting possibilities for economic application, the early papers in the volume demonstrate that...

The BoltzmannGibbs distribution is currently widely used in economic modeling. One of the applications is integrated with the DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) model. However, a question that arises concerns whether the BoltzmannGibbs distribution can be directly applied, without...

'This book is an ambitious intellectual enterprise to build a naturalistic foundation for economics, with amazingly vast knowledge of physical, biological, social sciences and philosophy. Readers will discover that approaches and insights emergent in institutional studies, (social)-neuroscience,...

The conventional utility-based approach to microeconomics is now nearly a century old and although frequently criticised, it has yet to be replaced. On the Reappraisal of Microeconomics offers an alternative approach that overcomes most of the objections to orthodox theory, whilst offering some...