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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