The public sector allocates 40 percent of expenditure in Britain. Why do affluent consumers acquire so much welfare outside the market? If choice is affected by myopic bias, optimisation is costly, consumer choice is fallible, and collective consumption provides a "commitment device". For a...

"Relying on markets alone would make for a poor, dishonest, and miserable society. Banks lend for the short term, and business has to make a profit in less time than that. It succeeds brilliantly when product life is shorter than credit maturities, in retail, consumer durables, services, and...

Markets are taken as the norm in economics and in much of political and media discourse. But if markets are superior why does the public sector remain so large? Avner Offer provides a distinctive new account of the effective temporal limits on private, public, and social activity. Understanding...