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While standard accounts of the theoretical debates in 1930s economic thought invariably pit John Maynard Keynes against Friedrich von Hayek, this reflexive dichotomy is in many respects exceedingly superficial. It is the argument of this book that both Keynes and Hayek developed their respective theories of the business cycle within the tradition of Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, and that this shared genealogy manifested itself in significant theoretical affinities between the two apparent antagonists. The salient features of Wicksell’s work, namely, the importance of money, the role of uncertainty, coordination failures, and the element of time in capital accumulation, all motivate the Keynesian and Hayekian theories of economic fluctuations, and contributed, The author argues to a fundamental convergence between the two economists during the course of the 1930s. Moreover, this shared, “Wicksellian” vision of the economic problem points to a very different research agenda from that of the Walrasian-style, general equilibrium analysis that has dominated postwar macroeconomics. The book aims not only to deconstruct some of the historical misconceptions of the Keynes versus Hayek debate but also to suggest how the insights thus uncovered can inform and instruct modern theory. While much of the analysis is quite technical, it does not assume previous knowledge of 1930s economic theory and thus should be accessible to economists, political scientists, and historians with general economics training, as well as to graduate students in these fields.

This book offers an analytical perspective on the policy debate on the design and reform of the international financial architecture. It stresses the role played by coordination problems in the origin and management of crises by relating the insights of the new literature on global games to earlier work on currency crises, bank runs, and sovereign debt default. It draws on recent research and policy work to examine the debate on the design of sovereign bankruptcy procedures, the role of the IMF in influencing the actions of creditors and debtors, and the role of private sector involvement in the management of financial crises.

Offers a vision of the economy as a system of structured information flow. The structuring is effected by institutions, and in particular, by firms, which specialize in processing the information needed to allocate resources properly. Market‐making firms that intermediate between producers and consumers by developing brands, are particularly important in this respect. Firms are the institutional embodiment of the visions of the entrepreneurs who found them. Firms grow and decline, creating a highly flexible structure of information processing in society, which evolves and adapts as circumstances change. The book uses these general concepts to analyse the historical development of a number of specialist information subsystems, including business networks, industrial districts, and trading empires.

Introduces methodological tools for dynamic analysis of macroeconomic phenomena: consumption and investment choices, employment, and unemployment outcomes, and economic growth. Discrete‐time dynamic optimization under uncertainty is introduced in Ch. 1 and applied to intertemporal consumption theory, with particular attention to empirical implementation. Chapter 2 focuses on continuous‐time optimization techniques and discusses the relevant insights in the context of partial equilibrium investment models. Chapter 3 applies previous chapters’ tools to dynamic labour demand, deriving the labour market equilibrium when both firms and workers face dynamic adjustment problems. Chapter 4 studies continuous‐time equilibrium dynamics of representative‐agent economies featuring both consumption and investment choices, with applications to long‐run growth issues. The role of externalities in more recent models of endogenous growth is carefully discussed. Chapter 5 studies the determination of aggregate equilibria in markets with decentralized trading, discussing the possibility of coordination failures and multiple equilibria. A search model of the labour market, focussed on the flows into and out of unemployment, is then analyzed and the dynamics of frictional unemployment are discussed. Many exercises can be found both within and at the ends of chapters, with extended solutions.

Considerable controversy exists among demographers, economists, and sociologists over the causes of fertility change in developing and developed countries. The neoclassical economic approach to fertility is embraced by its supporters because it facilitates the application of sophisticated consumer and household production theory to one of the most private and intimate questions: a couple's reproductive behaviour. Despite the theoretical appeal of the economic approach, it has been eschewed by many critics because of its lack of social and institutional context, its neglect of cultural factors and its requirements of ‘rationality’. The integration of social interaction with economic fertility models in this book emerges as a powerful tool to overcome many of these criticisms. First, the analysis provides a formal integration of economic, sociological, and other approaches to fertility and shows that there is a useful and promising agenda at the intersection of these schools. The second and more important goal is to sharpen the analytic lens with which theorists from different schools investigate fertility. For economists, the work shows the advantages of moving beyond individual decision‐making and embedding the fertility decisions in a ‘local environment’ with interpersonal information flows, ‘atmospheric’ or social externalities, norms, and customs. For sociologists, this work intends to show that the theorizing about the interaction in social network can be more sophisticated. Thirdly, the findings have important implications for population policy. The analyses in this book show when family planning is likely to diffuse and lead to rapid adoption of birth control, and they derive conditions when Pareto‐improving policy measures are likely to exist.

A theory of collective rationality identifies collective acts that are evaluable for rationality and formulates principles for their evaluation. This book argues that a group's act is evaluable for rationality if it is the product of acts its members freely and fully control. It also argues that such an act is collectively rational if the acts of the group's members are rational. Efficiency is a goal of collective rationality, but not a requirement, except in cases where conditions are ideal for joint action and agents have rationally prepared for coordination. A theory of collective rationality also yields principles concerning solutions to games. One principle requires that a solution constitute an equilibrium among the incentives of the agents in the game. In a cooperative game some agents are coalitions of individuals, and it may be impossible for all agents to pursue all incentives. Because rationality is attainable, the appropriate equilibrium‐standard for cooperative games requires pursuit of an incentive only if it provides a sufficient reason to act. The book's theory of collective rationality supports an attainable equilibrium‐standard for solutions to cooperative games and shows that its realization follows from individuals' rational acts. This book's theory of collective rationality contributes to philosophical projects such as contractarian ethics and to practical projects such as the design of social institutions.

This book shows how to fuse marketing, finance, and other disciplines to improve performance for the corporation or organization. Specifically, it shows decision makers at different levels in the organization and in different functional areas (e.g., marketing, finance, new product development, and human resources management) how to overcome the problems resulting from function- and discipline-based “silos.” The book has several novel features. All concepts are presented in a simple and easily accessible question-and-answer format. The book provides an in-depth analysis of a broad spectrum of important managerial topics (e.g., how to allocate advertising funds between Internet and conventional advertising, how to evaluate brand equity for mergers and acquisitions, and how to coordinate product design, marketing strategy, and production). In addition, because of its fusion-based methodology, the book provides decision makers with new tools to address familiar managerial problems (e.g., resource allocation and the design of managerial contracts in multiproduct or multidivisional firms). Throughout the book, the focus is on providing managers with actionable theories and metrics that are rigorous yet practical, and that allow the firm or organization to fuse — not merely interface — different functional areas.

This book deals with the structural crystallography of inorganic oxysalts in general. A special emphasis is placed upon structural topology and the methods of its description. The latter include graph theory, nets, 2-D and 3-D tilings, polyhedra, etc. The structures considered range from minerals to organically templated oxysalts, for all of which this book provides a unified approach to structure interpretation and classification. Most of the structures are analysed and it is shown that they possess the same topological genealogy and relationships, sometimes despite their obvious chemical differences. In order to expand the range of oxysalts considered, the book offers traditional schemes and also alternative approaches such as anion topologis, anion-centered polyhedra and cation arrays. It also looks into the amazingly complex and diverse world of inorganic oxysalts.