This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a 'bad' equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to increase...

In fall 1935, Abraham Wald presented a fixed-point proof of a general equilibrium model to Karl Menger's Mathematical Colloquium in Vienna. Due to limited space, the paper could not be printed in the eighth proceedings of the Colloquium (the Ergebnisse) published in spring 1937 but was scheduled...

This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson's mathematics. The paper sheds new lights on Samuelson's Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson's foundational ideas, embodied in...

This paper conducts a systematic comparison of behavioral economics's challenges to the standard accounts of economic behaviors within three dimensions: under risk, over time and regarding other people. A new perspective on two underlying methodological issues, i.e., interdisciplinarity and the...

The concept of 'the core' originates in cooperative game theory and its introduction to economics in the 1960s as a basis for proofs of existence of general equilibrium is one of the earliest attempts to use game theory to address big questions in economics. Discovery of the core was met with...

The paper aims to show how the formal revolution in economics has influenced the developments of Rational Choice and Game Theory in Political Science. Our focus will be on American political scientist William H. Riker (1920-1993). We want to show how Riker used game theory and adapted it to...

The present paper revisits the path by which Coase came to set down the result now generally known as the Coase theorem in his 1960 article. I draw on both the published record and archival resources in an effort to clear away some of the mist and, as it will emerge, dispel some of the...

Paolo Sylos Labini's Oligopoly Theory and Technical Progress (1957) is considered one of the major contributions to entry-prevention models, especially after Franco Modigliani's famous formalization. Nonetheless, Modigliani neglected Sylos Labini's major aim when reviewing his work (1958),...

F. A. Hayek took two trips to Chile, the first in 1977, the second in 1981. The visits were controversial. On the first trip he met with Genera l Augusto Pinochet, who had led a coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. During his 1981 visit, Ha yek gave interviews that were published in the...

While historians of economics have noted the transition toward empirical work in economics since the 1970s, less understood is the shift toward \quasi-experimental" methods in applied microeconomics. Angrist and Pischke (2010) trumpet the wide application of these methods as a \credibility...