In diverse areas – from retirement savings, to fuel economy, to prescription drugs, to consumer credit, to food and beverage consumption – government makes personal decisions for us or helps us make what it sees as better decisions. In other words, government serves as our agent. Understood...

This paper provides, after a contextualizing introduction, the first-time translation of Walter Eucken’s presentation during the first session of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, April 1-10, 1947. Eucken was the only scholar based in Germany to attend the conference and took...

In the history of economic thought Walter Eucken is mostly known for his impact in establishing the Social Market Economy in post-war Germany. Even though there is a growing interest in his ideas especially from an Austrian and a Constitutional Economics perspective, his influence on the...

We argue James M. Buchanan's scholarship provides us an exemplary model for doing liberal political economy. Levy (2014) argues there are irreconcilable tensions within liberalism between rationalism and pluralism. Buchanan navigates these tensions in a way that powered one of the most important...

This paper contextualizes the early political economy of Austrian economist and social philosopher F. A. Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. It argues that the particular urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to preserve and stabilize the disintegrating orders of economy and...

We outline the work of James Buchanan and his influence and contributions to political economy, institutional analysis, and self-governance. In addition to pioneering the public choice movement, we argue that Buchanan’s greatest contribution to political economy was initiating the...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

When firms' shrouding of charges, as in Gabaix and Laibson (2006), meets with consumers' salient thinking, as in Bordalo et al. (2013), this can have severe welfare implications. The ensuing excessive competition for headline prices tends to inefficiently bias consumers' choice towards...

Inclusivity is perhaps the single most important human need to facilitate and demonstrate fairness for all members in an open and free society. When this principle need is compromised by appearances of unscrupulous self-interested privileged elites to perpetuate a systemic widening disparity...

We develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication in retail financial markets. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we characterize the optimal timing of obfuscation for a profit-maximizing monopolist....