Hayek regards complexity as specific to spontaneous orders or self-organizing structures. These orders are characterized by the phenomena of irreducible ignorance and emergence (of new properties of the whole which its separate parts do not possess) and by the incapacity to handle them. Their...

Few problems in decision theory have raised more persisting interest than the Allais paradox. It appears that sufficiently many brilliant works have addressed it from within decision theory proper for history and philosophy of science now to enter the stage. In its historical side, the paper...

The paper is a brief account of Georges-Théodule Guilbaud?s (1912-2006) contributions to contemporary aggregative theories. An unnoticed precursor, Guilbaud anticipated on the algebraic conception of aggregation and on the more recent judgment aggregation theory, which generalizes social...

This paper analyzes how economic history and cliometrics can improve our understanding of the financial crises. We discuss the contributions of authors like Reinhart and Rogoff, Bordo and Eichengreen. According to Reinhart and Rogoff the recent crisis is similar in many aspects to former...

J.S. Mill is generally considered to be the theorist who gave birth to the concept of natural monopoly in its modern sense. Yet, no author has specified that Mill distinguishes two types of monopoly, the ?natural monopoly? and the ?practical monopoly?. I show that Mill?s notion of ?practical...

In this article, we study the motives which drive an entrepreneur to innovate according to Jeremy Bentham [1748-1832]. We show that the innovator, called at this time the projector, can be considered through the prism of the theory of expected utility, but not as a risk-lover: it is not the game...

In a closely argued book, Patinkin [1982] has concluded that Michal Kalecki did not anticipate the General Theory. The three main arguments developed by Patinkin are discussed with reference to his interpretation of Keynes?'s General Theory. Focused on Kalecki?'s 1934, article, that Patinkin did...

The economic thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau has often been reduced to some pieces on money, inequalities, luxury and autarky. Compared to contemporary writings of Quesnay, Smith or Hume, it has been considered for long as backward. Jean Mathiot has however shown that, far from being...

The Jean-Joseph Graslin?s Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l?impôt [1767] is at the same time one of the most brilliant critical analysis of physiocracy and the synthesis of a systematic thought which announces the sensualist political economy of the end of the Ancien Régime. The...

This article analyses Maurice Allais?'s contribution to the study of the stability of a competitive equilibrium. In his Traité d?'économie pure [1943], he demonstrates the local stability of a walrasian economy under a set of hypothesis tantamount to gross substitutability (Negishi [1962])....