The perfectly competitive market - a hypothetical situation free of market failure - serves as a benchmark for economic theory, providing the basis for the two fundamental welfare theorems. The radical abstractions of this idea makes it hard to grasp its full implications, however. In this...

The perfectly competitive market - a hypothetical situation free of market failure - is the basis for the two fundamental welfare theorems, and an important benchmark for economic theory. The radical abstractions of this idea, however, make its full implications hard to grasp. I address this...

I demonstrate a straightforward but apparently widely unrecognized implication of the standard requirements for perfect competition: an economy in which consumers can choose to learn is generally not perfectly competitive. In particular, if endogenous welfare relevant learning is feasible, the...

Applied welfare economics proceeds from the assumption that preferences are fixed and independent of social context. Social psychologists and anthropologists, in contrast, interpret preferences as being strongly shaped by culture and the prevailing social norms. This viewpoint is supported by a...

The perfectly competitive market – a hypothetical situation free of market failure – is the basis for the two fundamental welfare theorems, and an important benchmark for economic theory. The radical abstractions of this idea, however, make its full implications hard to grasp. I address this...