In their efforts to create and maintain a position in a market, firms make positioning investments of various sorts, in R&D, plant, advertising, and location, or more generally, in product development and maintenance. In an environment where the success of positioning investments is stochastic,...

This is a unique account of the role played by 58 figures and diagrams commonly used in economic theory. These cover a large part of mainstream economic analysis, both microeconomics and macroeconomics and also general equilibrium theory.

In their efforts to create a position in a market, and to maintain that position, firms make positioning investments of various sorts, in R&D, plant, advertising, and location, or more generally, in product development and maintenance. The heart of this paper is the hypothesis that the success...

The happiness literature has established that, in the developed countries, increasing affluence has not increased well-being in recent decades. We seek an explanation for this in terms of conspicuous consumption, a phenomenon originally identified by Veblen. We develop some simple general...

When agents make their choices simultaneously, network effects often give rise to a selection problem involving perfectly coordinated, Pareto-optimal equilibria. We characterize this selection problem, and introduce a generalized sequential choice model to address it. In this model, we show how...

The paper is divided into two parts: one-dimensional markets and two-dimensional markets. Also, we develop both one and two-dimensional models. Within each, we distinguish (a) bounded, (b) unbounded but finite, and (c) unbounded, infinite spaces. Among other things, we show: in one dimension,...

On an infinitely-extensible plane (with uniform customer-density) the socially-optimal configuration of firms is a regular hexagonal lattice. Will the free market necessarily produce this configuration? We argue that the currently-accepted, affirmative answer has been erroneously derived from...