Contemporary economic liberalism comes in two forms: a substantive version, which defines the scope and extent of economic policy, and a procedural version, which draws on citizens' preferences. Whereas the recent reconception of economic liberalism based on social-contract theory considers the...

It has been claimed that the market fosters selfishness and thereby undermines the moral basis of society. This thesis has been developed with an emphasis on market exchange. Everyday life is, however, predominantly shaped by interactions in the workplace rather than by shopping behaviour. This...

"Men more easily renounce their interests than their tastes." (Rochefoucauld) Consistency and constancy are hallmarks of Odysseus' behavior with respect to the Sirens. The usual reading is that he is a general model of the way all self-control situations should be handled. The alternative...

I investigate the role played by Charles Babbage in the economic analysis of technological change. His contribution is quite important, for the way in which he carried out his studies anticipated themes that are the centre of economics and policy-making today. He considered the economic forces...

The paper focuses on competition policy, which is at the center of ordoliberal thinking. Important characteristics are the emphasis on individual freedom, from which the goal of economic efficiency is merely derived; the strong role for the state in the preservation of the prerequisites of...

In international trade policy, the concept of market access is pivotal. Yet, it remains a neglected category in institutional-economics approaches to international trade. The paper introduces a new analytical category, which relates explicitly to the exchange of market access among governments:...

Austrian economics allows us to identify a number of weak spots in the modern economics of organization that all relate to the treatment of knowledge. Specifically, this body of theory is open to the same kind of objections that HAYEK [1937, 1945] raised against economics, namely that it does...

Standard economic explanations of good conduct in trade rely almost exclusively on future-directed extrinsic motivations induced by material incentives. But intrinsic motives to behave trustworthily and to punish untrustworthiness do support trade. In our model, intrinsically motivated players...

We propose evolutionary dynamics to show how rules converge into norms. Individuals play a game of upholding or rejecting a rule, and the more they uphold the rule, the more it becomes established as a norm. We find that when individuals are rational, the initial state determines whether the...

Internal organization relies heavily on psychological consistency requirements. This perspective has been emphasized in modern compensation theory, but has not been extended to organization theory. The idea is developed by starting from Williamson's discussion of idiosyncratic exchange. The...