In this paper a method is developed to derive prices for natural goods from information about material and energy flows within ecosystems. The derivation is based on an analogy between ecological and economic systems: both systems are characterized by flows of material and energy. To derive...

What can we learn about applied price theory from the Bourgeois Era? In this paper, we contend there are three important lessons that can be extracted from McCloskey's work on the Great Enrichment. First, transaction costs are not constraints, but objects of choice. Second, property rights are...

The canonical bargaining game in economics is the ultimatum game, played by tens of thousands of students around the world over the past three decades. In the ultimatum game, first studied by Werner Guth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze (1982), the “proposer” proposes how to split a...

The interest-rate controversies between Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher have attracted little attention and, in the opinion of most commentators, justifiably so. Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher argue over what appear to be two minor issues – Böhm-Bawerk's claims that his third cause of interest (productivity...

The present essay is the second in a series of three papers which examine alternative approaches to inflation. Here we identify some of the principal criticisms expressed against neoclassical views on price behaviour and business behaviour. These challenges grew from the early discovery of...

The History of Economic Thought as a field has long taken it as a premise that so far as ancient economic thought is concerned, only the Greeks and Romans are worth studying. This paper introduces the Guanzi as a core text in ancient Chinese economic thought on price stabilization from a...

This paper develops a comparative and connected history of the debates over transition to a market economy in West-Germany after World War II and in China during the first decade of reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping (1978-1988). At both historical moments the political aim was to...

We ask why, in many circumstances and many environments, decision-makers choose to act on a time-regular basis (e.g. adjust every six weeks) or on a stateregular basis (e.g. set prices ending in a 9), even though such an approach appears suboptimal. The paper attributes regular behaviour to...

We analyze the strategic behavior of firms when demand is determined by a rule of thumb behavior of consumers. We assume consumer dynamics where individual consumers follow simple behavioral decision rules governed by imitation and habit as suggested in consumer research. On this basis, we...

This paper develops a statistical framework of steady-state identities which enable us to match the distributions of durations found in the micro-data to generalized Taylor and Calvo models of time-dependent pricing. We illustrate the approach with the UK micro CPI data for 2006-2009, and employ...