This article pays homage to E. K. Hunt who was a founding member of URPE who helped build chapters on several campuses in western states. Much of the author’s own research work over the past forty years was an attempt to strengthen criticisms Hunt voiced long ago about markets and blind...

An important difficulty in many models of behavioral economics is that preferences are endogenous and unstable. Therefore, preferences may not provide the most desirable yardstick to evaluate social states. This paper proposes unconditional love as a candidate for such a yardstick. The concept...

It is commonly assumed that identification with a social group is constant throughout the play of a one-shot game in the absence of feedback. We provide evidence which challenges this assumption. We direct subjects to play one of two versions of the prisoner's dilemma game. These versions are...

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Instead, pref- erences are usually assumed to be �xed and exogenously given. Building on related work on reasons and rational choice (Dietrich...

Control is becoming increasingly frequent in cyberspace, to an extent that puts into question the latter’s traditional openness. In order to investigate the origins and effects of such change the paper formally model the historical evolution of digital control. In the model, the economy-wide...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the dynamics of the fashion cycle as originally described by Simmel (1904). The theoretical models used in the more recent economic literature (Stigler & Becker 1977; Karni & Schmeidler 1990; Matsuyama 1992; Coelho & McCure 1993; Corneo & Jeanne 1997) have the undeniable...

Control over digital transactions has steadily risen in recent years, to an extent that puts into question the Internet’s traditional openness. In order to investigate the origins and effects of such change the paper formally model the historical evolution of digital control. In the model, the...

We study whether an altruistic preference can survive in competition with other preferences and investigate the relationship between the equilibrium proportion of altruism and equilibrium material and subjective welfare. Altruism survives whenever preferences are sufficiently observable....

Why do firms exist? What is their function? What do managers do? What is the role, if any, of social motivation in the market? In this paper, we address these questions with a new theory of the firm, which unites some major themes in management, principal-agent theory, and economic sociology. We...

The majority of empirical studies make use of the assumption of stable preferences in searching for a relationship between risk attitude and the decision to become and stay an entrepreneur. Yet empirical evidence on this relationship is limited. In this paper, we show that entry into...