This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a 'bad' equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to increase...

This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a “bad” equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to...

The theory of melioration, originally formulated for individual decision-making contexts, is formally extended to a game theoretic framework. This paper proves the existence of a distribution that is a melioration strategy on the part of all players. Further, the question of stability of such a...

The theory of melioration, originally formulated for individual decision-making contexts, is formally extended to a game theoretic framework. This paper proves the existence of a distribution that is a melioration strategy on the part of all players. Further, the question of stability of such a...

Harry Johnson's 1971 ideas about the factors affecting the success of the Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-revolution are summarised and extended to the analysis of the Rational Expectations - New Classical (RE-NC) Revolution It is then argued that, whereas Monetarism brought...

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...

After having been ignored for a long time by economists, happiness is becoming an object of serious research in 21st century economics. In Section 2 we sketch the present status of happiness economics. In Section 3 we consider the practical applicability of happiness economics, retaining the...

Kahneman and Tversky and their behavioral economics stand in a long tradition of applying mathematics to human behavior. In the seventeenth century, attempts to describe rational behavior in mathematical terms run into problems with the formulation of the St. Petersburg paradox. Bernoulli’s...

This paper discusses three approaches to well-being in economics which use insights from psychology to support their position: Scitovsky's Joyless Economy, happiness economics, and the constitutional approach to happiness in economics. It shows that in the way these approaches make use of...

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),...