Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or...

During his first presidential term (1885-89), Cleveland opposed the partisan “spoils system” in the civil service, private legislation to benefit particular constituents, federal disaster relief, and protectionism. Public choice theory provides an illuminating framework for examining the...

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on 29 August 2005, leaving a great deal of destruction, pain, and uncertainty in its wake. Post-disaster community rebound is a collective action problem where every individual's decision to rebuild is impacted by the likelihood that others in the community...

This paper argues that the sharing economy — through the use of the Internet and real time reputational feedback mechanisms — is providing a solution to the “lemons problem” that many regulations, and regulators, have spent decades attempting to overcome. Section I provides an overview...

Israel Kirzner has made important contributions to our understanding of the critical role that entrepreneurship plays in markets and has considerable influence in economics, public policy and entrepreneurship studies. For Kirzner, understanding the role of the entrepreneur is essential to...

For North, the "intellectual entrepreneurs of ideology" or "ideological entrepreneurs" can and often do play a key role in ideological change. Although ideological entrepreneurs play such a key role in bringing about ideological and, so, institutional change, Douglas North does not devote a lot...

While there is now a large literature on the negative aspects of social capital, recent discussions of social capital within the public choice literature have tended to focus on the positive role of social capital in solving collective action problems and promoting political accountability....

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the Austrian school’s methodological orientation, which they named “subjectivism,” in a way that shows its affinity with the main thrust of John Dewey’s notion of the logic of inquiry. It is trying to make two distinct but related points. First,...