This paper documents Hohfeld’s influence on interwar American institutionalism. We will mainly focus on three leading figures of the movement: John Rogers Commons, Robert Lee Hale, and John Maurice Clark. They regarded Hohfeld’s contribution on jural relations as a preliminary step toward...

In his seminal “Clio and the Economics of Qwerty”, Paul David indicates Thorstein Veblen’s famous discussion of the British system of coal rail haulage as an intellectual antecedent to the idea of lock in. This note documents how Albert G. Keller, a Yale sociologist contemporary of Veblen,...

Warner Winslow Gardner’s notes on The Institutional Theory of John R. Commons (1933) are published here for the first time, as far as the present editors can determine. The typewritten manuscript was found among the Robert Lee Hale papers at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia...

This article explores in detail the reactions among American economists to John Bates Clark's famously controversial claim that the marginal productivity theory of factor pricing and distribution is necessarily just. The general debate around Clark's “naïve productivity ethics,” as George...

Both relational and positional goods are based upon an idea of joint consumption - thought with opposite signs. In both cases, agents are not self-regarded, but their consumption choices are other-regarded. Moreover, relational good lies on identity of its consumers. It implies a certain degree...