This paper focuses on some of the overlooked costs of war-related public research. We discuss two unseen consequences of war-related public science. The first is the distortionary effect of government-influenced research on academic disciplines. The second is the opportunity cost of the...

This paper analyzes collective outcomes in games from a revealed preference perspective. A collective choice function is rationalizable if there are such “rational” individual preferences, that the observed choices are the only equilibria. We consider a generalized concept of Nash...

One of the most famous and outstanding formalizations of the Coase Conjecture is that by Gul, Sonnenschein, and Wilson (1986). A peculiarity of their model — as well as all other examinations of the Coase Conjecture of which I am aware, including that by Coase himself — is that it assumes...

I have been asked to compare James Buchanan's body of work with that of George Stigler for a symposium on Stigler's contributions to economics. I run my exposition through Frank Knight, who exerted strong though different forms of influence over both Stigler and Buchanan. Stigler's oeuvre is...

We conducted a survey by mail in 2013 of randomly selected economics professors in the United States about the welfare effects of three proposed policy reforms. We received back 574 completed surveys (a 19 percent response rate). A large majority supported a reform to increase immigration into...

DSGE modeling remains the workhorse of contemporary macroeconomics despite a growing number of critiques of its ability to explain the aggregate properties of an economic system. For the most part, those critiques accept the DSGE presumption that traditional macro data are primitive, causal...

We generalize Hotelling’s model of spatial competition with more than two firms in a two-dimensional space. Firms choose both price and location to maximize profits. The principle of minimum differentiation does not hold in general. Local duopolies emerge from the interaction between firms....

Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington conducted fieldwork in metropolitan police departments across the United States. They found that small police departments with a high degree of community involvement were...

Firms spend operating costs to mitigate the risk of data breach events. However, firms may not know how much to spend to prevent data breach events with varying incidence frequencies. I present a model that estimates the relationship of breach prevention spending to breach incidence rates for...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy that we seek to erase. That theory can account for coordination through markets. Such coordination, however, covers only some 50-60 percent of economic activity within developed nations. The theory ignores the remainder by presuming...