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...

Knowledge creation is analyzed by means of two important properties, those of being (a) a co relational structure and (b) a retrieval or interpretative structure. Furthermore, it is shown that knowledge has a local character in the sense of being able to correlate only a limited number of...

The veil of uncertainty as an analytical device has been adopted by Buchanan in his works, and this paper argues that the Coase Theorem can be represented by the analytical device of a single owner-wealth maximization apparatus. On the surface, these two analytical devices are unrelated, but the...

There is robust experimental evidence that some people have selfish preferences, and others have social, or other-regarding, preferences. This paper seeks to explain why there is such preference heterogeneity. In our approach preferences are endogenous to the economy's institutional setup. We...

The Coase theorem states that in the world of zero transaction costs, utilization of resources will be efficient regardless of how property rights are assigned initially. Buchanan criticizes the zero-transaction-costsqualifier and emphasizes that as long as transactions are agreed upon through...

The recent move to import empirical results into law and policymaking have introduced challenges related to drawing proper inferences from quantitative studies. The purpose of this essay is to elaborate on three specific cautions on the use of economics experiment results. First, critiques of...

We explore the implications of altruism in family firms for the allocation of decision-making rights. Our results suggest that centralization occurs in a broader range of circumstances in family than in nonfamily firms, consistent with empirical evidence. We show that an agent might remain in a...

Corporate actors differ from individuals in that it may be possible to observe the formation of the corporate will from outside, and to influence its formation. This feature can be exploited by regulators. One technique is inducing corporate actors to hire an interface actor, representing the...

In a model of Coasean bargaining over externalities it is described how agents can manipulate their opponent's reservation utility by strategic actions at a pre-bargaining stage, such as the choice of a pollution technology. This may imply  misallocation of resources, and opening up trade...

This paper explores the location decisions of final-good producers under imperfect contract enforcement. The legal systems'; quality is measured by the contracting environment in each country. The final producers'; location decisions create different outcomes in terms of efficiency. We find one...