nep-hpe New Economics Papers on History and Philosophy of Economics
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Issue of 2019‒09‒30
twelve papers chosen by
Erik Thomson (University of Manitoba)
http://ep.repec.org/pth72
[Selections by Humberto Barreto for SHOE list.]
1. Retrospectives: Tragedy of the Commons After 50 Years
Brett Frischmann; Alain Marciano; Giovanni Ramello
2. Arrow, Hausdorff, and Ambiguities in the Choice of Preferred States in
Complex Systems
T. Erber; M. J. Frank
5. From transaction costs to transaction value: Overcoming the
Coase-Williamson paradigm
Frolov, Daniil
6. Methods, Models, and the Evolution of Moral Psychology
Cailin O'Connor
7. Role of honesty and confined interpersonal influence in modelling
predilections
Khalid, Asma; Beg, Ismat
8. U.S. Trade Policy in Historical Perspective
Douglas A. Irwin
9. Neo-Kaleckian and neo-Marxian regime research: A promising scientific
research programme or a scientific cul-de-sac?
Heise, Arne
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1. Retrospectives: Tragedy of the Commons After 50 Years
Brett Frischmann (Villanova University); Alain Marciano (MRE - Montpellier
Recherche en Economie - UM - Université de Montpellier); Giovanni Ramello
(Dipartimento di scienze giuridiche ed economiche, Universita degli studi
del piemonte orientale - Universita degli studi del piemonte orienta)
Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) has been incredibly
influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite
some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin focused on the stress
population growth inevitably placed on environmental resources.
Unconstrained consumption of a shared resource-a pasture, a highway, a
server-by individuals acting in rational pursuit of their self-interest can
lead to congestion and worse, rapid depreciation, depletion, and even
destruction of the resources. Our societies face similar problems, not only
with respect to environmental resources but also with infrastructures,
knowledge, and many other shared resources. In this Retrospective, we
examine how the tragedy of the commons has fared within the economics
literature and its relevance for economic and public policies today. We
revisit the original piece to explain Hardin's purpose and conceptual
approach. We expose two conceptual mistakes he made, that of conflating
resource with governance and conflating open access with commons. This
critical discussion leads us to the work of Elinor Ostrom, the recent Nobel
Prize in Economics Laureate, who spent her life working on commons. Finally,
we discuss a few modern examples of commons governance of shared resources.
Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02288208&r=hpe
2. Arrow, Hausdorff, and Ambiguities in the Choice of Preferred States in
Complex Systems
T. Erber; M. J. Frank
Arrow's `impossibility' theorem asserts that there are no satisfactory
methods of aggregating individual preferences into collective preferences in
many complex situations. This result has ramifications in economics,
politics, i.e., the theory of voting, and the structure of tournaments. By
identifying the objects of choice with mathematical sets, and preferences
with Hausdorff measures of the distances between sets, it is possible to
extend Arrow's arguments from a sociological to a mathematical setting. One
consequence is that notions of reversibility can be expressed in terms of
the relative configurations of patterns of sets.
Date: 2019–09
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1909.07771&r=hpe
5. From transaction costs to transaction value: Overcoming the
Coase-Williamson paradigm
Frolov, Daniil
The transaction cost economics has accumulated a mass of dogmatic concepts
and assertions that have received high stability under the influence of path
dependence. These include the dogma about transaction costs as frictions,
the dogma about the unproductiveness of transactions as a generator of
losses, Stigler-Coase theorem and the logic of transaction cost
minimization, the dogma about the priority of institutions providing
low-cost transactions. The listed dogmas underlie the prevailing tradition
of transactional analysis – the Coase-Williamson paradigm – which, in turn,
is the foundation of neo-institutional theory. Therefore, the community of
new institutionalists implicitly block attempts of a serious revision of
this dogmatics. The purpose of the article is to substantiate a
post-institutional (alternative to the dominant institutional discourse)
perspective for the development of transactional studies based on rethinking
and combining forgotten theoretical alternatives. We are talking about
Commons’s theory of transactions, Wallis-North’s theory of transaction
sector and Zajac-Olsen’s theory of transaction value. The article provides
arguments and examples in favor of the broader explanatory possibilities of
post-institutional transactional analysis.
JEL: B4 B52
Keywords: institutions, institutional complexity, transactions,
transaction costs, transaction value, post-institutionalism
Date: 2019–07–19
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:95959&r=hpe
6. Methods, Models, and the Evolution of Moral Psychology
Cailin O'Connor
Why are we good? Why are we bad? Questions regarding the evolution of
morality have spurred an astoundingly large interdisciplinary literature.
Some significant subset of this body of work addresses questions regarding
our moral psychology: how did humans evolve the psychological properties
which underpin our systems of ethics and morality? Here I do three things.
First, I discuss some methodological issues, and defend particularly
effective methods for addressing many research questions in this area.
Second, I give an in-depth example, describing how an explanation can be
given for the evolution of guilt---one of the core moral emotions---using
the methods advocated here. Last, I lay out which sorts of strategic
scenarios generally are the ones that our moral psychology evolved to
`solve', and thus which models are the most useful in further exploring this
evolution.
Date: 2019–09
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1909.09198&r=hpe
7. Role of honesty and confined interpersonal influence in modelling
predilections
Khalid, Asma; Beg, Ismat
Classical models of decision-making do not incorporate for the role of
influence and honesty that affects the process. This paper develops on the
theory of influence in social network analysis. We study the role of
influence and honesty of individual experts on collective outcomes. It is
assumed that experts have the tendency to improve their initial predilection
for an alternative, over the rest, if they interact with one another. It is
suggested that this revised predilection may not be proposed with complete
honesty by the expert. Degree of honesty is computed from the preference
relation provided by the experts. This measure is dependent on average
fuzziness in the relation and its disparity from an additive reciprocal
relation. Moreover, an algorithm is introduced to cater for incompleteness
in the adjacency matrix of interpersonal influences. This is done by
analysing the information on how the expert has influenced others and how
others have influenced the expert.
JEL: C44 C61 D71 D81
Keywords: Honesty; group decision making; social network analysis;
confined influence; predilection.
Date: 2018–06–15
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:95831&r=hpe
8. U.S. Trade Policy in Historical Perspective
Douglas A. Irwin
This survey reviews the broad changes in U.S. trade policy over the course
of the nation’s history. Import tariffs have been the main instrument of
trade policy and have had three main purposes: to raise revenue for the
government, to restrict imports and protect domestic producers from foreign
competition, and to reach reciprocity agreements that reduce trade barriers.
These three objectives – revenue, restriction, and reciprocity – accord with
three consecutive periods in history when one of them was predominant. The
political economy of these tariffs has been driven by the interaction
between political and economic geography, namely, the location of
trade-related economic interests in different regions and the political
power of those regions in Congress. The paper also addresses the impact of
trade policies on the U.S. economy, such as the welfare costs of tariffs,
the role of protectionism in fostering American industrialization, and the
relationship between the Smoot-Hawley tariff and the Great Depression of the
1930s.
JEL: F13 N71 N72
Date: 2019–09
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26256&r=hpe
9. Neo-Kaleckian and neo-Marxian regime research: A promising scientific
research programme or a scientific cul-de-sac?
Heise, Arne
[Introduction] Over the past three decades, a small but very productive
Post-Keynesian and Marxian research community has engaged in the elaboration
of a scientific research programme (SRP) that has come to be known as wage
and profit-led regime research.1 In dozens of journal articles in almost
every heterodox economic journal, particularly the Cambridge Journal of
Economics, the primary aim has been to reiterate the classical political
economy conception of functional income distribution as a major determinant
of economic development and employment, from both a Keynesian (effective
demand) and Marxian (class struggle) perspective. Only recently, the Review
of Keynesian Economics (RoKE) dedicated - convening almost the entire 'wage
and profit-led regime' community - an incredible four (consecutive) issues
to delineating and discussing this Denkstil. The International Labour Office
(ILO), meanwhile, commissioned a major research initiative investigating the
relationship between functional income distribution and growth (see
Lavoie/Stockhammer 2013a).2 Since only very few critical voices (such as
Peter Skott (2017) joined this illustrious debate, I would like to re-open
this discussion about the scientific and political merits of the 'wage and
profit-led regime' approach. My intention is to examine whether this SRP can
fill an obvious gap in Post-Keynesian theory. In accordance with Keynes'
considerable neglect of distributional questions in his General Theory, most
Post-Keynesians have underemphasised a phenomenon that has become one of the
most socially and politically concerning problems of our times: growing
income inequality. This article is structured as follows: in the next
section, the main arguments of the wage and profit-led regime approach will
be delineated and scrutinised with reference to the Bhaduri-Marglin model,
which is regarded as 'a widely used workhorse model' (Stockhammer 2017: 25).
I will subsequently question its theoretical bases, its empirical validity,
and its policy applicability. Finally, I offer a number of concluding
remarks on the merits of the distributional regime approach.
Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cessdp:74&r=hpe
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