The first price runs for Korean rice help us develop a Smithian physiocratic model to explain the low, stable prices of the eighteenth century and the rising, volatile prices of the nineteenth. Ownership rights provided incentives, and productivity after 1600 exceeded subsistence to achieve...

Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, den empirisch gehaltlosen Charakter der modernen, neowalrasianischen Interpretation der 'unsichtbaren Hand' darzustellen und die bisher vernachl?ssigten Leistungen ausgew?hlter klassischer ?konomen zur Bestimmung dieser Metapher hervorzuheben. Anfangs-...

Innovation is novelty - it involves doing new things in new ways. So new products, new processes, new organizational methods, new services, and so on, are all part of innovation. Technological innovation transforms and improves the technical attributes and performance characteristics of products...

The representative firm has been a much-criticized concept, subject to conflicting interpretations with respect to both its configuration and its intended role in Marshall's Principles (the Principles).2 The concept found itself a focal point of much of the debate during the significant cost...

In their 1963 classic Scarcity and Growth Howard Barnett and Chandler Morse argued that resource scarcity did not threaten economic growth. A second investigation in the late 1970s, Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered, reached largely the same conclusion. The 25 years since that work was published...

"The common-property literature has often focused on the question of efficiency. Here we consider distributional issues instead. How should the benefits of the commons (say, a fishery) be distributed? We approach the question from the viewpoint of ownership rather than income redistribution. "A...

"Institutional approaches to social dilemmas have so far focused on how to create incentive structures that channel individuals' behavior into socially desirable outcomes assuming that everyone is selfish. However, the presumption of universal selfishness is not only empirically invalid but may...