Collective Action and Exchange


Book Description

In Collective Action and Exchange: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy, William D. Ferguson presents a comprehensive political economy text aimed at advanced undergraduates in economics and graduate students in the social sciences. The text utilizes collective action as a unifying concept, arguing that collective-action problems lie at the foundation of market success, market failure, economic development, and the motivations for policy. Ferguson draws on information economics, social preference theory, cognition theory, institutional economics, as well as political and policy theory to develop this approach. The text uses classical, evolutionary, and epistemic game theory, along with basic social network analysis, as modeling frameworks. These models effectively bind the ideas presented, generating a coherent theoretic approach to political economy that stresses sometimes overlooked implications.




Solving Social Dilemmas


Book Description

"Solving Social Dilemmas demonstrates that social, political, and economic progress occur when ethical dispositions evolve in a manner that solves or ameliorate social dilemmas. That same process can account for the emergence of prosperous societies in the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was substantially a consequence of increased moral support for commerce and careers in commerce that had emerged during the previous two centuries. To support these claims, two analytical histories are developed. The first uses elementary game theory to illustrate how critical social dilemmas can be solved by internalized ethical ideas about "proper" or "moral" conduct. That analytical history implies that in the absence of solutions to critical social dilemmas-of which there are many thousands-social, political, and economic development tends to be curtailed. The second analytical history surveys three centuries of ethical assessments concerning the proper role of commerce in a good life and good society. The authors reviewed all used economic illustrations to illustrate moral principles or how they may be applied. Because the illustrating examples are ones that their readers would have found "obvious," they shed light on the ethical dispositions in the communities to whom those works were addressed. Together, they reveal that concerns about the effects of market son ethical dispositions were diminishing during the centuries before the great acceleration of commerce in the nineteenth century. In fact, many of the authors reviewed argued that there was a complete harmony between ethical dispositions and commerce. Together the two narratives imply that shifts in norms directly and indirectly account for the relative prosperity of the West compared to other parts of the World during the twentieth century. It turns out that flourishing commercial societies have moral foundations"--




Accounting for Tastes


Book Description

The answers to these and many other questions about people's consumption patterns, Becker argues, have to do with the way preferences and values are shaped. Although these are central topics of social behavior, they have never been addressed in a systematic and analytical way. Becker applies the tools of modern economic analysis to just this topic, one that economists have traditionally left out of their models for rational choice.




Post-Chicago Developments in Antitrust Law


Book Description

This work offers a critical evaluation of the Chicago approach to antitrust. The authors discuss the economic foundations of competition policy and the different ways in which both American and European competition law does - or does not - take account of economic insights.




Social Contract, Free Ride


Book Description

This book provides a novel account of the public goods dilemma. The author shows how the social contract, in its quest for fairness, actually helps to breed the parasitic 'free riding' it is meant to suppress. He also shows how, in the absence of taxation, many public goods would be provided by spontaneous group co-operation. This would, however, imply some degree of free riding. Unwilling to tolerate such unfairness, co-operating groups would eventually drift from voluntary to compulsory solutions, heedless of the fact that this must bring back free riding with a vengeance. The author argues that the perverse incentives created by the attempt to render public provision assured and fair are a principal cause of the poor functioning of organised society.




Institutions, Social Norms and Economic Development


Book Description

In order for economic specialization to develop, it is important that well-defined property rights are established and that suspicion and fear of fraud do not pervade transactions. Such conditions cannot be created ex abrubto, but must somehow evolve. What needs to develop is not only suitable practices and rules themselves, but also the public agencies and moral environment without which generalized trust is difficult to establish. The cultural endowment of societies as they have developed over their particular histories is bound to play a major role in this regard, and the matter of cultual endowment is one of the central themes of this book. On the other hand, division of labour does not only require well-enforced property rights and trust in economic dealings. It is also critically conditioned by the thickness of economic space, itself dependent on population density. This provides the second major theme of the volume: market development, including the development of private property rights is not possible, or will remain very incomplete, if populations are thinly spread over large areas of land. The book makes special reference to sub-Saharan Africa.




Infrastructure


Book Description

This book devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy.




The Economics of Law, Order, and Action


Book Description

According to the standard position of the economic mainstream, the efficient production of so-called public goods, including law and defense, requires the use of territorial monopolies of coercive force. Two arguments are put forward for this position: a "positive" one, based on the claim that only such institutions can successfully supply society with crucial public goods, and a "negative" one, based on the claim that such institutions by themselves constitute inevitable "public bads". This book challenges this assumption by utilizing the insights of the Austrian School of Economics, New Institutionalism, constitutional political economy, and other heterodox economic approaches, combined with economically informed ethical analysis. It puts forward a positive case for voluntary social organization that offers new insights into the intersection of economic logic, social philosophy, institutional analysis, and the theory of entrepreneurship. In other words, in an attempt to draw on the interdisciplinary spirit of classical political economy, this book aims at providing a comprehensive economic and ethical case for extending the applicability of voluntary, entrepreneurial cooperation to the realm of creating and sustaining legal and protective services together with attendant institutional frameworks.




Environmental Regulation


Book Description

Environmental Regulation: Law, Science, and Policy demystifies the complexity of environmental law. It provides up-to-date, comprehensive and accessible coverage of this growing and rapidly changing field. After exploring the causes of environmental problems and the moral values they implicate, the casebook provides a structural overview of the regulatory system. It considers how environmental law seeks to protect public health and the environment from climate change, toxic chemicals, hazardous wastes, and air and water pollution. This casebook also covers land use regulation, protection of biodiversity, environmental impact assessment, environmental enforcement, and international environmental law. Written in a style accessible to the non-specialist, this casebook affords instructors flexibility in organizing courses. Effective teaching and study aids include outlines of the structure of each environmental statute, real-world-based problems and questions, “pathfinders” explaining where to find crucial source materials for every major topic, an extensive glossary, and a list of acronyms. The casebook is kept current with annual statutory and case supplements. New to the Tenth Edition: ● West Virginia v. EPA and the amorphous “major questions” doctrine ● Sackett v. EPA narrows the reach of the Clean Water Act’s protection of wetlands ● State climate and environmental rights litigation ● The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the green energy transition ● 2023 amendments to the National Environmental Policy Act ● Papal climate encyclical Laudato Si updated by Pope Francis Professors and students will benefit from: ● comprehensive and up-to-date coverage in a style accessible to the non-specialist ● self-contained chapters for flexibility in organizing courses ● a detailed examination of policy focus on environmental statutes how statutes translate into regulations factors that affect real-world behavior ● effective teaching and study aids outlines of the structure of each environmental statute real-world-based problems and questions “pathfinders” explaining where to find crucial source materials for every major subject area extensive glossary list of acronyms