So I went through the Ricardian model that shows how agents' differences in opportunity costs of production give reasons for trade that results in gains all round, contrary to the US folklore of exchange as a battle between Smart and Stupid ( Read more... )

n talking about social exchange institutions, we've been talking about contracts-- which are not markets ( Read more... )

And now I reveal that I've been quietly putting something past my readers, in talking about markets as an exchange technology. Without mentioning it (much) I have been talking about spot markets ( Read more... )

Note: In talking about the continuum that goes from markets to contracts to firms, as social technologies for exchange, I am discussing distinctions that public discourse typically ignores and that economists often forget about in applying conceptual models to the worlds we live in ( Read more... )

I'm talking now about the social technologies that make trade possible, widening the choices available to agents pursuing some objective or objectives. I have discussed property rights systems and both law and reputation as means of maintaining them ( Read more... )

For this last lap of discussing the foundations of how economists reason about choice, I'll be talking about social technologies for exchange: individual pairwise exchange, markets, contracts, and firms ( Read more... )

Yesterday in talking about the right to transfer property to heirs, I alluded to the general restriction on women owning any but personal property, in Great Britain and the United States. (Okay, I just filled that out a little.) To my mind that provides a graceful segue to the last common property rights institution I wanted to mention as something ( Read more... )

Yesterday I mentioned that laws and systems making property inheritable, along with private ownership of productive resources, can lead to more environmentally responsible results than commons ( Read more... )

For decades I've noticed how often people talk as if some set of proper property rights laws were innate in nature. It seems to me pretty clear that this is incorrect, though clearly a common human habit of thought ( Read more... )

The most fundamental thing about how economists talk and think about choice is the notion that agents choose from a set of possibilities, with the aim of furthering some particular objective ( Read more... )