Static and Dynamic Aspects of General Disequilibrium Theory

Static and Dynamic Aspects of General Disequilibrium Theory
Author: P. Jean-Jacques Herings
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1461562511

Mathematical economics uses mathematical tools and reasoning to describe and explain economic reality. At the core of mathematical economics is general equilibrium theory. Static and Dynamic Aspects of General Disequilibrium Theory describes and analyses various general equilibrium models, treating theory from an axiomatic point of view, which may lead to a deeper understanding of problems, may help to avoid incorrect reasoning, and may improve communication within the economic science. This volume consists of four parts, each of which is self-contained. Part I deals with the mathematical and economic preliminaries. Part II considers the static aspects of disequilibrium theory. Part III determines price rigidities endogenously. Finally, Part IV deals with dynamic aspects of disequilibrium theory.

Static and Dynamic Aspects of General Disequilibrium Theory

Static and Dynamic Aspects of General Disequilibrium Theory
Author: P. Jean-Jacques Herings
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2011-10-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781461562528

Mathematical economics uses mathematical tools and reasoning to describe and explain economic reality. At the core of mathematical economics is general equilibrium theory. Static and Dynamic Aspects of General Disequilibrium Theory describes and analyses various general equilibrium models, treating theory from an axiomatic point of view, which may lead to a deeper understanding of problems, may help to avoid incorrect reasoning, and may improve communication within the economic science. This volume consists of four parts, each of which is self-contained. Part I deals with the mathematical and economic preliminaries. Part II considers the static aspects of disequilibrium theory. Part III determines price rigidities endogenously. Finally, Part IV deals with dynamic aspects of disequilibrium theory.

Raising Keynes

Raising Keynes
Author: Stephen A. Marglin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 921
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674971027

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes's lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes's intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes's message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes's intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

Social Networks and Trust

Social Networks and Trust
Author: Vincent Buskens
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2005-12-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0306476452

Social Networks and Trust discusses two possible explanations for the emergence of trust via social networks. If network members can sanction untrustworthiness of actors, these actors may refrain from acting in an untrustworthy manner. Moreover, if actors are informed regularly about trustworthy behavior of others, trust will grow among these actors. A unique combination of formal model building and empirical methodology is used to derive and test hypotheses about the effects of networks on trust. The models combine elements from game theory, which is mainly used in economics, and social network analysis, which is mainly used in sociology. The hypotheses are tested (1) by analyzing contracts in information technology transactions from a survey on small and medium-sized enterprises and (2) by studying judgments of subjects in a vignette experiment related to hypothetical transactions with a used-car dealer.

Technology Investment

Technology Investment
Author: Kuno J.M. Huisman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475734239

This chapter is organized as follows. The economic problem on which this book focuses is motivated in Section 1. The two tools used to study this economic problem, which are real options theory and game theory, are discussed in Sections 2 and 3, respectively. Section 4 surveys the contents of this book. In Section 5 some promising extensions of the research presented in this book are listed. 1. TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT Investment expenditures of companies govern economic growth. Es pecially investments in new and more efficient technologies are an impor tant determinant. In particular, in the last two decades an increasing part of the investment expenditures concerns investments in informa tion and communication technology. Kriebel, 1989 notes that (already) in 1989 roughly 50 percent of new corporate capital expenditures by major United States companies was in information and communication technology. Due to the rapid progress in these technologies, the tech nology investment decision of the individual firm has become a very complex matter. As an example of the very high pace of technological improvement consider the market for personal computers. IBM intro duced its Pentium personal computers in the early 1990s at the same price at which it introduced its 80286 personal computers in the 1980s. Therefore it took less than a decade to improve on the order of twenty times in terms of both speed and memory capacities, without increasing the cost (Yorukoglu, 1998).

Coalition Formation and Social Choice

Coalition Formation and Social Choice
Author: Ad M.A. Van Deemen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475725787

Coalition Formation and Social Choice provides a unified and comprehensive study of coalition formation and collective decision-making in committees. It discusses the main existing theories including the size principle, conflict of interest theory, dominant player theory, policy distance theory and power excess theory. In addition, the book offers new theories of coalition formation in which the endogenous formation of preferences for coalitions is basic. Both simple game theory and social choice theory are extensively applied in the treatment of the theories. This combined application not only leads to new theories but also offers a new and fresh perspective on coalition formation and collective decision-making in committees. The book covers the fundamental concepts and results of social choice theory including Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Furthermore, it gives a coherent treatment of the theory of simple games. Besides more traditional topics in simple game theory like power indices, it also introduces new aspects of simple games such as the Chow parameter, the Chow vector and the notion of similar games.

Cooperative Decision-Making Under Risk

Cooperative Decision-Making Under Risk
Author: Jeroen Suijs
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1461546370

In cooperative games, one generally assumes that the agents know exactly the joint (monetary) gains that can be achieved by any possible coalition of cooperating agents. In reality, however, only little is known with certainty. This does not necessarily imply that traditional cooperative game theory cannot be applied in practical situations, for in various cases knowledge of the expected gains suffices. In many other cases, however, it is just the sharing of risk that is beneficial. Joint ventures, for instance, exist since cooperation reduces the risk of the investment for the individual parties. Since the existing models fail to incorporate such risks, they are not suitable for analyzing cooperative decision-making under risk. This book aims to rectify this deficiency by discussing a model of cooperative games with random payoffs.

Verbal Decision Analysis for Unstructured Problems

Verbal Decision Analysis for Unstructured Problems
Author: Oleg I. Larichev
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2013-11-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475726384

A central problem of prescriptive decision making is the mismatch between the elegant formal models of decision theory and the less elegant, informal thinking of decision makers, especially when dealing with ill-structured situations. This problem has been a central concern of the authors and their colleagues over the past two decades. They have wisely (to my mind) realized that any viable solution must be informed by a deep understanding of both the structural properties of alternative formalisms and the cognitive demands that they impose on decision makers. Considering the two in parallel reduces the risk of forcing decision makers to say things and endorse models that they do not really understand. It opens the door for creative solutions, incorporating insights from both decision theory and cognitive psychology. It is this opportunity that the authors have so ably exploited in this important book. Under the pressures of an interview situation, people will often answer a question that is put to them. Thus, they may be willing to provide a decision consultant with probability and utility assessments for all manner of things. However, if they do not fully understand the implications of what they are saying and the use to which it will be put, then they cannot maintain cognitive mastery of the decision models intended to represent their beliefs and interests.

Social Ties and Economic Performance

Social Ties and Economic Performance
Author: Frans van Dijk
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1996-12-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780792398363

This volume focuses on the social impact of the public sector on the performance of the private sector, especially in the long term. It presents a model of the formation of social ties by economic interaction and uses this to explore the relevance of social ties and their dynamics for economic performance. The impact of public provision and stochastic migration on social ties and the (total) provision level of the public good are also examined. It discusses the role of social ties in other types of interaction, and proposes definitions of social capital and infrastructure. Furthermore, it contains a discussion of the connections between the different conceptions of these terms. Also the effects of social ties and the influence of different types of public intervention on growth are examined. The assumption of exogenously determined, stochastic migration is dropped, and migration behavior is analyzed explicitly. In this theoretical investigation of the dynamics of social ties and economic interaction a number of important effects on economic performance will be suggested.