The perfectly competitive market - a hypothetical situation free of market failure - serves as a benchmark for economic theory, providing the basis for the two fundamental welfare theorems. The radical abstractions of this idea makes it hard to grasp its full implications, however. In this...

Humans are fundamentally social. Social activities require coordination, which may yield multiple equilibria in the form of stable, self-reinforcing patterns of herd behavior. Since environmental impacts can differ substantially between alternative equilibria, such self-reinforcing behaviors...

The perfectly competitive market - a hypothetical situation free of market failure - is the basis for the two fundamental welfare theorems, and an important benchmark for economic theory. The radical abstractions of this idea, however, make its full implications hard to grasp. I address this...