The aim of this section is to develop a model of the linkage between the macro-dynamics of price and the micro-dynamics of individual buyers and sellers, drawing on classical micro-economic theory ( Jehle & Reny, 2001 ). Jehle and Reny's book is in three parts. The first part discusses economic...

The Wikipedia (2008) entry for mathematical sociology cites four books with ‘mathematical sociology’ in the title: Coleman (1964) , Fararo (1973) , Leik and Meeker (1975) and Bonacich (2008) . Fararo (1973, pp. 764–766) provides a guide to the literature in mathematical sociology covering...

In his soliloquy, Hamlet reasons about the choice of whether to end his life or not. Our own experience of choice contains many such instances of choice as the outcome of a reasoning process. This aspect of choice is not discussed in this book although I would look to Chapter 3 on mathematics,...

The subject matter of psychology can be illustrated by addressing the questions, ‘who am I?’, ‘what do I spend my time doing?’ and ‘reflecting on my life, where have I come from and where am I going?’. I am a human being and also more generally an animal. I am a biological entity and...

I am interested in a set X of entities and refer to this as a multiple-entity system unless the set contains just a single entity. Each entity can be characterised either by a single attribute or by many attributes. In general, then we have a system of n entities with m attributes, giving nm...

According to Kolm (1998, p. 3) , social ethics addresses the question ‘what should be done in society?’ The topic of justice constitutes a very large part of social ethics although other virtues are also important. Kolm distinguishes between macro-justice and micro-justice. For the former,...

Are the statements which we make true?…and, if they are true, how do we know that they are true? To address these two questions let us first note that this book is interested in two types of truth: mathematical truth and scientific truth. Mathematical truth applies to statements within a...

Consider now the set of all possible events that can occur in a given context. There is a distinction between an elementary event and a compound event. The set of elementary events is exhaustive, exclusive and elementary: the elementary events cover all the possible events; no two of them can...

In his discussion of early lexical development in children Barrett (1995) notes that utterances can be of the following types: an expression of an internal state, a response to a specific context, a social-pragmatic utterance and a referential utterance. A referential utterance can be thought of...