This book presents the history of economic thought as it relates to today’s most pressing problems, and it emphasizes the critical connection that exists between what may seem cold, unrealistic mathematical economic models, and the quality of everyday life of any citizen of the planet earth....

The emergence of transaction cost economics (TCE) in the early 1970s with Oliver Williamson’s successful reconciliation of the so called neoclassical approach with Herbert Simon’s organizational theory can be considered an important part of the first cognitive turn in economics. The...

Bayesian rationality is the paradigm of rational behavior in neoclassical economics. A rational agent in an economic model is one who maximizes her subjective expected utility and consistently revises her beliefs according to Bayes’s rule. The paper raises the question of how, when and why...

This is an entry produced for the Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis, edited by Gilbert Faccarello and Heinz D. Kurz. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, forthcoming.

Most late 19th-century US economists gave a rather cool welcome to the Sherman Act (1890) and, though less harshly, to the Clayton and FTC Acts (1914). A large literature has identified several explanations for this surprising attitude, calling into play the relation between big business and...

Marshall's theory of capital was designed to serve two main purposes: an integration of the theory of income distribution into a general theory of value and the closing of the gap between economic theory and business practice. For the first purpose, capital was considered the reward for the...

Marshall's theory of capital was designed to serve two main purposes: an integration of the theory of income distribution into a general theory of value and the closing of the gap between economic theory and business practice. For the first purpose, capital was considered the reward for the...

Marshall's theory of capital was designed to serve two main purposes: an integration of the theory of income distribution into a general theory of value and the closing of the gap between economic theory and business practice. For the first purpose, capital was considered the reward for the...

Building on the predecessors' thoughts and modern researches from empirical disciplines, and with thinking over the behavior assumption usually held and used by mainstream economics, the paper generalizes three basic assumptions and one explanatory framework on human individual behavior and its...

Abstract What went so wrong in economics started in 1939 with ‘The Hicksian Getaway,’ where – after over ten years of debate assuming increasing returns – Hicks asserted decreasing returns as the basis for his competitive frame, dismissing any “useful analysis” of increasing returns....