Reading in economics and organization theory

Reccomendations from Forrest:

• Gintis, Herbert. 2009. The bounds of reason : game theory and the

unification of the behavioral sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• ———. 2009. "Game theory evolving : a problem-centered introduction to

modeling strategic interaction." Princeton University Press.

• Henrich, Joseph Patrick, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer,

Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis, eds. 2004. Foundations of human sociality : economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

• Henrich, Joseph Patrick, Richard McElreath, Abigail Barr, Jean

Ensminger, Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Michael Gurven, Edwins Gwako, Natalie Henrich, Carolyn Lesorogol, Frank Marlowe, David Tracer, and John Ziker. 2006. "Costly Punishment Across Human Societies." Science 312 (5781):1767-70.

• Mantzavinos, C., Douglass C. North, and Syed Shariq. 2004. "Learning,

Institutions, and Economic Performance." Perspectives on Politics 2 (01):75-84.

• Pierson, Paul. 2000. "Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the

Study of Politics." The American political science review 94 (2):251-67.

• ———. 2004. Politics in time : history, institutions, and social

analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Carpenter, Daniel P. 2001. The forging of bureaucratic autonomy :

reputations, networks, and policy innovation in executive agencies, 1862-1928. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

• Bates, Robert H., Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal,

and Barry Weingast. 1998. Analytic narratives. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

• North, Douglass C., and Barry R. Weingast. 1989. "Constitutions and

Commitment: The Evolution of Institutional Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England." The Journal of Economic History 49 (4):803-32.

• Shepsle, Kenneth A., and Barry R. Weingast. 1981. "Structure-induced

equilibrium and legislative choice." Public Choice 37 (3):503-19.

• ———. 1984. "When Do Rules of Procedure Matter?" The Journal of

Politics 46 (1):206-21.

• North, Douglass Cecil. 2005. Understanding the process of economic

change. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

From me to Converge: " Sorry for soliciting discussion on economics, but I wanted to round out my view on the institutional economics. I am personally really happy with it and it has been clearing up my thinking for the past few months. It will probably also be getting an extra boost after the big thumbs up from Northern Europe. Could any of the libertines point me to good attacks on Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom? I want to disqualify anything that calls them socialists, since I would be inclined to consider that angle too ignorant to be useful. But if that is all there is, I'll read it. Best, -seth "

From Anthony:

" There are probably critiques. But every good libertarian I know to discuss them has praised them, including for the Nobel (multiple sources discussed in second link):

http://mises.org/story/3784 http://hayekcenter.org/?p=1752 "

These links are to the only palatable libertarian literature I've ever read (mostly due to ignorance of the lit, to be fair).

from first article: It is an excellent framing of Wiliamson's themes as sympathetic to Chicago school economics.

this is a connection of some potentially useful Austrian ideas to Coase/Williamson: " While Coase, Simon, Hart, etc. do not draw explicitly on the Austrians, this distinction can also be interpreted in terms of Menger's distinction between orders and organizations, or Hayek's cosmos and taxis. Coase and Williamson are simply saying that the firm is a taxis, the market a cosmos. This does not deny that there are "unplanned" or "spontaneous" aspects of the internal organization of firms, or that there is purpose, reason, the use of monetary calculation, etc. in the market. "

excellent account of microeconomic assumptions of the firm: " Asset Specificity and Austrian Capital Theory

As noted above, the black-box approach to the firm that dominated neoclassical economics omits the critical organizational details of production. An equally serious omission is that production is typically treated as a one-stage process, in which factors are instantly converted into final goods, rather than a complex, multi-stage process unfolding through time and employing rounds of intermediate goods. Capital is treated as a homogeneous factor of production, the K that appears in the production function along with L for labor. Following Solow (1957) models of economic growth typically model capital as what Paul Samuelson called shmoo — an infinitely elastic, fully moldable factor that can be substituted costlessly from one production process to another.

In such a world, economic organization is relatively unimportant. All capital assets possess the same attributes, and thus the costs of inspecting, measuring, and monitoring the attributes of productive assets is trivial. Exchange markets for capital assets would be virtually devoid of transaction costs. A few basic contractual problems — in particular, principal-agent conflicts over the supply of labor services — may remain, though workers would all use identical capital assets, and this would greatly contribute to reducing the costs of measuring their productivity. "