The world economy is undergoing startling change. Almost every country has been moving toward freer markets and extensions of the private enterprise capitalist system. Of late the process has been most marked, I suppose, in China during the early 80’s and more recently in the amazing transformation of the formerly Communist nations of Eastern Europe. But nations belonging to the Organization of...

In neoclassical theory, product differentiation provides consumers with a variety of different products within a particular industry, rather than a homogeneous product that characterizes purely competitive markets. The welfare-enhancing benefit of product differentiation is the greater variety of products available to consumers, which comes at the cost of a higher average total cost of producti...

a r t i c l e i n f o Policy prescriptions for sustainable consumption have been dominated by neoclassical economics, which is built around the notions of market equilibrium, utility maximization, and exogenous preferences. There are concerns that neoclassical economics is inadequate to guide policy prescriptions in the presence of evolving preferences and complex dynamics. Evolutionary economi...

This paper centers on the theoretical–methodological interconnections between Weber and the Austrian economists. First, the influence of classical Austrian economics, especially Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, on Weber is reexamined. Then we are concerned with the importance of Weber’s ideas in neoclassical Austrian economics, including Schumpeter, Mises and Hayek. Also, Weber’s legacy in modern econom...

We build and describe an agent-based model: the Surprise Game. The game comprises a “world” of 30 fi rms, each of which has to survive (and, if possible, prosper) in its environment, which is nothing more than the other 29 fi rms. Each fi rm has to latch onto one or other of the four strategies that are predicted by the theory of plural rationality but has to relinquish that strategy and latch ...

here's a curious symmetry between the arguments propounded over the last century in advocacy of socialism and the present popular discussion of the reform of centrally planned economies. In those old discussions, the vision of socialism was utopian, which was contrasted with the Dickensian realities of capitalism. Now, the disasters of central planning are contrasted with the benefits flowing f...