The most important financial source for behavioral economics is the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF). The most prominent behavioral economists among the RSF’s twenty-six member Behavioral Economics Roundtable (BER) are Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler, Camerer, Loewenstein, Rabin, and Laibson. The...

We reexamine some of the classic problems connected with the use of cardinal utility functions in decision theory, and discuss Patrick Suppes's contributions to this field in light of a reinterpretation we propose for these problems. We analytically decompose the doctrine of ordinalism, which...

This article restates the essential link existing between Malthus' theory of prices and distribution, and his theory of effective demand. The first part of the article deals with his theory of prices and distribution, and shows that, although his contribution to this field has been largely...

Metaphors are part of our daily lives as they help us understand the world. Economics, as other areas of knowledge, cannot go without metaphors. Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) – a prominent theoretical framework on economic organisation – is no different: it has been built on a set of...

Bayesian rationality is the paradigm of rational behavior in neoclassical economics. A rational agent in an economic model is one who maximizes her subjective expected utility and consistently revises her beliefs according to Bayes's rule. The paper raises the question of how, when and why this...

Prepared for the reissue of Frank Knight's <I>The Economic Organization</I> by Transaction Books, which includes both "The Economic Organization" and "Notes of Utility and Cost." The introduction covers the context of Knight's writing his little textbook, its place in the history of Chicago price...</i>

This paper examines Mark Blaug's position on the normative character of Paretian welfare economics: in general, and specifically with respect to his debate with Pieter Hennipman over this question during the 1990s. The paper also clarifies some of the confusions that emerged within the context...

In this paper we address the story of developments in general equilibrium theory (GET) in the USSR during the 1970s through the lens of a single biography. The Soviet advances in mathematical economics, only fragmentarily known in the West, give an occasion to reflect on the extension of the...

During the interwar years in the first half of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises emerged as one of the leading economic thinkers in Continental Europe. Though a general economic theorist, Mises's main contributions early in his career were in the field of monetary theory, monetary policy,...

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),...