Analyzing simple and natural price-adjustment processes that converge to a market equilibrium is a fundamental question in economics. Such an analysis may have implications in economic theory, computational economics, and distributed systems. Tâtonnement, proposed by Walras in 1874, is a process by which prices go up in response to excess demand, and down in response to excess supply. This pape...

Most electronic marketplaces are derived from a client/server model, with a central coordinator institution in the middle and a closed group of market participants submitting bids and asks to that institution. In contrast, technical views on electronic commerce often envision ad-hoc cooperation between market participants in open and decentralized IT environments, where software agents negotiat...

The core of Ludwig von Mises’ thought is the theory of human action, or praxeology, the general science he seeks to articulate. Within this general science is included—embedded in it—catallactics, or the science of exchange (Mises [1949] 1996: 1–3; hereafter M). Consequently, to Mises everything we seek to study in economics stems ultimately from individual choice, the key to which is subjectiv...

The strength of the neoclassical paradigm, generations of students have been told, lies in its hardheaded grounding in a general model of self-interested action. But recent developments in microeconomic theory have shown that the selfinterested behavior underlying neoclassical theory is artificially truncated: it depicts a charmingly Victorian but utopian world in which conflicts abound but a h...

The purpose of this article is to give an historical sense of the intellectual developments that determined the form and content of Kenneth Arrow’s pathbreaking work published in 1951. One aspect deals with personal influences that helped shape Arrow’s own thinking. A second aspect is concerned with the early history of the general theory of relations, which is mainly centered in the nineteenth...

Make sure to use a different exam book for each part (i.e. There are 3 parts, so you will need 3 books). I. True, False, Uncertain Short Answers. Explanation determines the grade. Only a few well chosen sentences are necessary, but you can use models and/or graphs to support your explanations. (25 minutes, i.e. approximately 4 minutes per question). a. In the Robinson Crusoe world, a proportion...

This article advocates the classical geometric and visual approach to spatial economic modelling, as a means for intuitive understanding, and as a complement to the discrete network representation of space. It is also argued that it is time to abandon the rather weak optimality explanations for such issues as the genesis of hexagonal shapes, and replace them by more robust considerations of str...