"Gary Becker once wrote a periodic column for Business Week, and, in the December 29, 1997 issue, his column was entitled "Why Every Married Couple Should Sign a Contract." Becker argues, roughly, that marriage, a complex contractual arrangement (subject to dissolution), should be fine-tuned to...

Der Mikroökonomie-Professor legt ein Hochschullehrbuch vor, das Studienanfängern betriebswirtschaftlicher Bachelorstudiengänge einen gut verständlichen Einstieg ermöglicht. Hier wird nicht, entsprechend der Curricula streng abstrahiert, hier geht es um die mikroökonomischen Methoden und...

This paper develops an expanded framework for social planning in which the existence of coercion is explicitly acknowledged. Key issues concern the precise definition of coercion for individuals and in the aggregate, its difference from redistribution, and its incorporation into normative...

We develop a theory of social planning with a concern for economic coercion, which we define as the difference between consumers' actual utility, and the counterfactual utility they expect to obtain if they were able to set policy themselves. Reasons to limit economic coercion include protecting...

Despite the vast literature on the energy-efficiency gap, there is a general dearth of investment models which incorporate the consumer's temporal freedom in the investment decision. Focusing on the building sector, we formulate optimal investment in energy efficiency as a problem of wealth...