Israel Kirzner has been one of the leaders in fashioning an Austrian school of economics. In his rendering of the Austrian school, one finds a marriage between Friedrich Hayek's discourse with Ludwig von Mises's deductive, praxeological image of science of Ludwig von Mises - a marriage that...

In studying the history of toll road companies in California, we see motives of both use-and-esteem and residual returns. Some road companies were initiated as business enterprises, aiming squarely at dividends. For other road companies, use-and-esteem motivations inspired a large number of...

Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner have suggested that the availability of profit opportunities tends to evoke entrepreneurial discovery. But many have downplayed the conjecture because the Hayekians have not been able to demonstrate the validity of the conjecture. In fact, Hayekians discuss why...

Using Schelling's analysis of mutual coordination and focal points, I interpret Smithian sympathy as sentiment coordination. When the yearning for sentiment coordination seeks, further, for it to encompass the whole social group and looks naturally to government for the focal points, we have The...

Using an N-person model, I explore the microfoundations of benevolent rules-dominant situations (of which the familiar time inconsistency models are examples). I show that under discretion the citizens confront a prisoner's dilemma, and I discuss the similar dilemmas embedded in the time...

The paper formalizes several of the ideas about commitment set out by Thomas Schelling in 'The Strategy of Conflict'. Using a game-theoretic framework we formalize and interpret 'promise' and 'threat' as different species of commitment. We also distinguish the 'pure promise', the 'pure threat',...

Electronic toll collection has trimmed transaction costs and moved highways out of the "public goods" box and into the "public utilities" box. Economists and policymakers should think of highways as a service to be made demand-responsive, self-financing, and privately owned. This paper proposes...

The word coordination has two meanings, and these meanings are often conflated. One meaning, associated with Thomas Schelling, is seen in situations like choosing whether to drive on the left or the right; the driver must coordinate to each other's behavior. The other meaning, associated with...

Knowledge consists of the triad: information, interpretation, and judgment. Much of modern political economy has miscarried by proceeding as though knowledge were merely information - that is, as though interpretation were symmetric and final. Economic prosperity depends greatly on new knowledge...

Mainstream economists-Neoclassicals, in the narrow sense-have from time to time remarked on Israel Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurship. They have maintained that Kirzner says things that do not fit into normal economic theory, that conflict with normal theory, that are too speculative to...