Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human...

Previous discussions concerning the relationship between John Dewey’s pragmatic instrumentalism and institutional economics have focused on Clarence Ayres and on issues of valuation. This paper gives attention to the actual conduct of economic investigations by institutionalists such as Wesley...

Mainstream economics has been running the gauntlet of adverse criticism for decades. These critiques claim as a message of central importance that mainstream economics has lost its relevance for understanding reality. By making a brief comparison between the methodological strategies of the main...

Frank Knight’s theory of monopoly price has received relatively little attention in the literature on Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. We argue that Knight accepted and refined the monopoly price theory of Carl Menger and his followers. Knight highlights the difference between monopoly as an...

In this paper I outline the theory of institutional economics developed by John R. Commons and contrast it with neoclassical economic theory. Key concepts in Commons' theory are bounded rationality, property rights, working rules, institutions, transactions and incomplete contracts. Although...

Mainstream economics has been running the gauntlet of adverse criticism for decades. These critiques claim as a message of central importance that mainstream economics has lost its relevance as for understanding reality. By making a brief comparison between the methodological strategies of the...

For non-economists, it is often difficult to understand why economists place so much emphasis on the self-interest motive. It is obvious that people act out of a variety of motives - gratitude, anger, social obligation and many, many other motives. There are several reasons why economists still...

This paper investigates two different approaches to the analysis of institutions using game theory and discusses their methodological and theoretical implications for further research. Starting from von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory, we investigate, how Schotter and Schelling's approaches to...

This paper analyses the hypothesis that the robust relationship between trust - as measured by the World Values Survey's question "In general, do you think that most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?" - and economic growth, established by empirical...

As existing literature attests, in spite of methodological differences Marx and Veblen draw strikingly similar conclusions regarding production, conflict, and alienation in modern existence. We here attempt to establish that similarity in conclusion stems from similarity in approach. After...