Market exchanges are widely believed to rely on an overlap of interest, this paper argues that many market exchanges actually rely on a broader agreement between buyer and seller. The broader agreement includes the moral justification of the exchange and the associated norms of propriety. To...

Why is surrogacy enforceable in some of the US jurisdictions and not in others? In what way does the enforcement of surrogate motherhood contracts effect the number of exchanges between intended parents and surrogate mothers? Throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century, public...

In this chapter, we present fragments of previously unpublished correspondence between Ludwig Lachmann and G. L. S. Shackle on the nature of institutions. This correspondence allows us to rationally reconstruct a theory of institutions, which extends Lachmann's theoretical work. Shackle pointed...

One of the defining features of much of modern social science and economics, in particular, is the hard break it posits between everyday and scientific knowledge. French philosophers have called this feature the epistemological break. One of the key consequences of this feature is that...

Spanish Abstract: Douglass North nunca tuvo miedo a cambiar de opinión. Y es precisamente la curiosidad inquisitiva que sobresale en la personalidad de North. Pero ¿por qué – el lector podría preguntar – deberíamos hablar de una tesis que no es controvertida? Me explico: la capacidad de...