The common interpretation of Carl Menger’s take on capital theory rests upon a few sentences in his Principles of Economics. His later monograph on the topic, Zur Theorie des Kapitals (A contribution to the theory of capital), is more or less ignored, although it must be seen as a recantation...

This paper critiques Rothbard’s ([1962] 2004) concept of gross investment. Rothbard introduced the concept in order to demonstrate his point that it is not consumer spending that primarily drives the economy, like the mainstream Keynesian view maintains, but the capitalists’ spending. In...

This paper critiques Rothbard’s ([1962] 2004) concept of gross investment. Rothbard introduced the concept in order to demonstrate his point that it is not consumer spending that primarily drives the economy, like the mainstream Keynesian view maintains, but the capitalists’ spending. In...

The common interpretation of Carl Menger’s take on capital theory rests upon a few sentences in his Principles of Economics. His later monograph on the topic, Zur Theorie des Kapitals (A contribution to the theory of capital), is more or less ignored, although it must be seen as a recantation...

The principles characterizing the traditional revenue-expense approach to accounting have never been “invented.” They are an institution that is the result of social evolution, not of human design. Therefore, the efforts to defend them against the balance sheet approach endorsed by...

Before economists and sociologists came up with their own definitions of the term "capital", it was commonly understood as money invested in businesses by their owners or shareholders, and it continues to be understood this way in everyday business practice. In a recent article, Geoffrey Hodgson...

The enterprise is an historical phenomenon specific to capitalism. It is a fictional agent created by accounting and sanctioned by law. It is based on capital and its purpose is to yield monetary profit. Within the framework of the market economy, production is organized according to the...

This note analyzes the Bertrand duopoly with constant but asymmetric marginal costs on a market with homogenous products. It is shown that there exist some equilibria that are ignored in the literature on IO. In addition, in this setting (perfectly or nearly perfectly) competitive equilibria exist.

Recent research has shown the usefulness of social preferences for explaining behavior in laboratory experiments. This paper demonstrates that models of social preferences are particularly powerful in explaining behavior if they are embedded in a setting of heteroge-neous actors with...

This paper provides experimental evidence on exit behavior of asymmetrically sized firms in a duopoly with declining demand. We conduct three treatments: (a) The basic model with indivisible real capital. The structure of this treatment represents the main findings of Ghemawat and Nalebuff...