Competition among firms has been suggested to reflect the ruthless logic of Darwinian selection: a free market is a struggle for survival, in which successful firms survive and unsuccessful ones die. This view appears to bolster three pillars of neoclassical economics: (1) that economic actors...

Emergence is often argued to be a deep property of complex systems, with such systems exhibiting wholes that are in some way greater than the sum of their parts. These ideas have played an important part in discussions of spontaneous order within Austrian economics, particularly by Hayek drawing...

An evolutionary tool kit is applied in this paper to explain how innate social behavior traits evolved in early human groups. These traits were adapted to the particular production requirements of the group in human phylogeny. They shaped the group members’ attitudes towards contributing to...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1986, James M. Buchanan has been one of the pioneers and founders of Public Choice theory and Constitutional Economics. The key to Buchanan's work lies in his deep-rooted devotion to the notions of voluntary exchange, self-determination, individualism,...

James M. Buchanan has argued that the primary role that the economist plays in society is a pedagogical one. The job of the economist is to teach students the principles of economics, most notably an understanding of spontaneous order and the role of the price system in generating that order...

Buchanan's work on the methodology of economics includes many references to externalities. Buchanan has emphasized that a subjective conception of economics, and a focus put on exchange rather than on choice, has implications on an analysis of externalities. In this paper, we analyze the reverse...

Documented results indicate prediction markets effectively aggregate information and form accurate predictions. This has led to a proliferation of markets predicting everything from the results of elections to a company's sales to movie box office receipts. Recent research suggests prediction...

Previous research has found considerable variation in risk taking behavior within individuals across tasks. In this paper, we develop a hypothesis derived from the psychology literature that such apparently inconsistent behavior can be explained by a subject's domain specific risk attitudes. To...

The most widely used economic models of social preferences are specified only for certain outcomes. There are two obvious methods of extending them to lotteries. If we do so by expected utility theory, so that the independence axiom is satisfied, our results imply that the resulting preferences...

Standard macro theories reflect a choice-theoretic orientation wherein aggregate variables are treated as acting directly on one another. Macro phenomena are thus reduced to the same order of simplicity as micro phenomena; macro variables differ from micro variables only by their larger size. In...