*Call for Papers*

Dear list members,

/The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought /invites 
submissions for a special issue.
*/Coordination Issues in Historical Perspectives/**
**/Research programs, debates and the fate of a protean concept/***


Since the days of Adam Smith (at least), economists have considered the 
price mechanism as a constitutive device for coordinating activities in 
complex market systems. Yet, it has also been noted that the price 
mechanism, as envisaged in ‘pure theory’, fails in many cases to 
coordinate intratemporal and intertemporal decisions, and that different 
mechanisms and modes may then (have to) come to operate in a 
substitutive or a complementary fashion. Issues of coordination failures 
and alternative mechanisms have received variable attention over time. 
They have sometimes been at the very heart of research programs and 
sometimes been totally bypassed. Intertemporal coordination failures, in 
particular, have been at the core of macroeconomics. While 
(neo-)classical economics argued that persistent unemployment has its 
roots in exogenous restrictions of price flexibility, Keynes (1936) 
questioned the role of price and wage adjustment as forces of 
self-correction, showing that wage and price flexibility could in fact 
have destabilizing effects (Howitt 2001). Keynes’ ideas paved the way 
for a long-term research program, making other economists think about 
coordination failures of the price mechanism in terms of disequilibrium 
adjustments. Lucas (1972), on the other hand, offered a framework based 
on Walrasian general equilibrium theory in which coordination issues 
were reduced to transitory problems resulting from informational 
imperfections. When Keynesian approaches regained attention in the 1980s 
and 1990s, the reference to disequilibrium dynamics had disappeared. 
Coordination issues came to be addressed in terms of multiple equilibria 
analysis. While microeconomics underwent profound changes through work 
in behavioral economics, experimental economics, agents-based modelling 
and other approaches that permit to investigate coordination issues in 
its realm, modern standard macroeconomics appears to leave many of the 
systemic coordination failures that were considered as relevant in the 
past out of its focus, if not its scope.

Following the award of an honorary doctorate from the University of Côte 
d'Azur (CNRS GREDEG) to Professor Peter Howitt on 8 September 2022, a 
workshop will be organised in cooperation with /EJHET/, the /European 
Journal of the History of Economic Thought/, on 9 and 10 September 2022. 
The workshop will bring together contributions that offer historical 
perspectives of the treatment of coordination issues in micro- and 
macroeconomics. Papers on specific research programs and modelling 
strategies or on debates and controversies in their historical context 
are welcome. A selection of the papers will be published in an /EJHET/ 
special issue in 2023.

*Proposals* for papers (between 700 and 1000 words) should be submitted 
by email to [log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]> no later than *15 
March 2022*.

Authors whose proposal is accepted (by the end of March / early April) 
will be expected to send a *full paper *by*15 August 2022*.

A selection of papers will be discussed during a *workshop at Université 
Côte d’Azur, *CNRS GREDEG (*Nice, *France) on*9-10 September 2022*.

*Final papers* are to be submitted to /EJHET/ by *15 December 2022* and 
will then be reviewed in line with the regular procedures of the journal.

https://bit.ly/3r6XieP <https://bit.ly/3r6XieP>

The Editorial Committee for the /EJHET/ special issue on Coordination 
Issues in Historical Perspectives:

Muriel Dal Pont Legrand ([log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>)
Hans-Michael Trautwein ([log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>)