"Despite abundant literature on transaction costs, there is little to no in-depth analysis regarding what the transaction is or how it works. Drawing on both mainstream and heterodox literature and a variety of interdisciplinary sources, this monograph traces the history of transaction costs in...

In their 1932 volume "American Business Leaders: A Study in Social Origins and Social Stratification," Frank W. Taussig and Carl S Joslyn, then a young Harvard graduate, argued that success in business depended more on innate superiority than on other environmental factors such as financial aid,...

This note reproduces an unpublished paper on "Social Values in Economic Consumption" which Knight prepared for the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Summer Conference, on Nantucket, Massachusetts in June 1931. This paper sheds new light on Knight in two important respects. First, it...

The legal realist Robert Lee Hale offered a definition of freedom as a zero-sum game: each volitional freedom implies some degree of coercion over other people's freedom and at the same time one's liberty is subject to some degree of control and coercion by others. The objective of our work is...

This paper deals with the analysis on adventitious utility—that contains many aspects that are connected to the contemporary debate on positional goods—of the early twentieth century American economist, largely forgotten today, George Pendleton Watkins. According to the author, adventitious...