Correctly or not, Ronald Coase is often credited with the doctrine that courts ought to adjudicate for efficiency, that "the value of production" should serve as the criterion for resolving disputes over the boundaries between property rights. The doctrine that courts ought to adjudicate for...

Although general equilibrium theory originated in the late nineteenth century, modern elaboration and development of the theory began only in the 1930s and 1940s. This book focuses on the version of the theory developed in the second half of the twentieth century, referred to by Lionel McKenzie...

This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how...

Post-Schumpeterians have tended to use biological analogies to understand economic evolution, in contrast to Schumpeter himself. In this paper it is argued that the biological analogies used tend to be outdated and that Schumpeter espoused an intuitive understanding of the evolutionary economic...

In evolutionary economics the firm is the sole locus of economic and technological change, and only little is said about the analytical importance of economic relationships. An emerging theme in the fields of economic sociology, however, is the idea that economic activities are embedded in...

In this paper it will be argued that Albert O. Hirschman’s research work is a remarkable instance of a methodological shift that began in the Fifties, and of which there seems to be scarce awareness nowadays notwithstanding its relevance for some of the issues that are in the agenda of...

The paper argues that a formal, and fruitful, historical analogy can be drawn between economics and a religious hierarchy, most notably the mediaeval Catholic church. This idea was fully developed in Freeman (2007), ‘Heavens Above: what equilibrium means for economics’, in Mosini, V (ed)...

This study discusses the potential applicability of Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) for macroeconomic modeling, with a particular stress on the following three issues: (1) taxonomy - what types of agents for macroeconomic models?; (2) scale robustness - how many agents for...

Economic Theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...