The welfare state is often portrayed as provider of insurance against ‘uncertainties’, in Knight's (1921) sense of the term, which would be refused or underinsured on private markets. This image conflicts with the standard economic model of risk exchange founded on the subjective...

This paper addresses the problem of the conceptualization of social structure and its relationship to human agency in economic sociology. The background is provided by John Maynard Keynes's observations on the effects of uncertainty and conventional behavior on the stock market; the analysis...

In the insurance literature, it is often argued that private markets can provide insurance against ‘risks' but not against ‘uncertainties' in the sense of Knight (1921) or Keynes (1921). This claim is at odds with the standard economic model of risk exchange which, in assuming that...