In order to address the question whether Hayek might have been an Agent-based Computational Economist (ACE) avant-la-lettre, we consider an ACE model concerning the phenomenon of information contagion. Alongside increasing returns, network externalities, and information cascades, information...

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...

Empirical studies of intertemporal dynamics of individual income, distribution of personal income, and growth and distribution of national income are all based on statistics that rely on some concept of income. The dominant one today appears to be the so-called Haig-Simons-Hicks (HSH) concept of...

Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) has been incredibly influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin focused on the stress population growth inevitably placed on environmental resources....

Based on the correspondence between Paul Samuelson, Leonard Jimmie Savage, Milton Friedman and Jacob Marschak between May and September 1950, the article reconstructs the joint intellectual journey that led Samuelson to accept expected utility theory and Savage to revise his initial motivations...

In spite of the use of a utilitarian language in Rational Choice Theory, economists do not acknowledge any link to this current of moral philosophy, and have made great efforts to rid economics from its legacy. In this document we aim at assessing these efforts retracing their history from...

In spite of the use of a utilitarian language in Rational Choice Theory, economists do not acknowledge any link to this current of moral philosophy, and have made great efforts to rid economics from its legacy. In this document we aim at assessing these efforts retracing their history from...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function – one of...

Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated protection from...