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This book provides and up-to-date look at the consumer movement and the intricacies of consumer behavior.Incorporates Internet and e-commerce, media and advertising, consumer consumption shifts, diet and health consumption, and coverage of fraud and identity theft.For those in customer service, marketing, and sales, and anyone interested in consumer science. ... Read more

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Reviews (3)

Are they trying to be esoteric?
This is a rigorous text on social choice theory that is very helpful for graduate students. However, there is so little discussion on how different findings are applicable to the real world. Social choice theory raises important issues for political theory, but these are addressed minimally. A much better book for those who want to learn about social choice but without so much math is William Riker's Liberalism Against Populism.

Gods of Thunder...
...and rock and roll. Austen-Smith and Banks rock so hard. THEY RULE

exquisite balance of accessibility and rigor
This book is a marvel. Austen-Smith and Banks have crafted a gem that should become standard fare for graduate-level study in political science. ... Read more

Book Description

A proven classic. An exciting new textbook. Microeconomics, Tenth Edition, is both.

What's New About the Tenth Edition:

New Co-Author Gary Yohe brings fresh perspective to the Tenth Edition, which benefits from a careful reexamination of every line of text, a wide range of new cases and applications, and important innovations in the coverage of contemporary topics.New Cases and Applications Microeconomics has always led the field in its distinctive use of real-world applications to motivate the presentation of theory, and Professor Yohe's Tenth Edition continues that tradition. Many applications are woven skillfully into the exposition, while others appear as boxed examples, roughly one-fourth of which are new to the Tenth Edition, including: Attracting Quality Students with Partial Scholarships; Is a CEO Really Worth Half a Billion Dollars Per Year?; and Two-Part Tariffs in the National Football League.New Emphasis on Game Theory Microeconomics has long been distinguished by its clear, accessible treatment of game theory, to which it devotes all of Chapter 13. But unlike other books, this one employs the tools of game theory in later chapters on investment (Chapter 15), asymmetric information (Chapter 18), and public sector economics (Chapter 19), through the use of boxed examples on a variety of applications.New Cross Chapter Cases Another unique feature linking microeconomic theory to the real world are the cross chapter cases, extended examples incorporate the material from multiple chapters. Two of the Tenth Edition's cross chapter cases are new: Technological Change and the Cost of Climate Policy (Part Three) and Shaking the Tree of Global Telecommunications Markets (Part Four). The others have been substantially updated for the Tenth Edition.New Striking Four-Color Design ... Read more

Book Description

This book provides a concise guide to financial asset pricing theory. Assuming a basic knowledge of graduate microeconomic theory, it explores the fundamental ideas that underlie competitive financial asset pricing models with symmetric information. Using finite dimensional techniques, this book avoids sophisticated mathematics and exploits economic theory to clarify the essential structure of recent research in asset pricing. In particular it explores arbitrage pricing models with and without diversification, Martingale pricing methods, representative agent pricing models; discusses these ideas in two date and multi-date models; and provides a range of examples from the literature. ... Read more

Book Description

Taylor's clear exposition and engaging, well-chosen examples—complemented by a unique graphical treatment—help clarify abstract economic concepts and encourage students to develop an economic way of thinking. The numerous graphs,including Taylor's trademark "Conversation Boxes," provide a visual, step-by-step demonstration of the economic models and theories under discussion.

Book Description

Modelling trends and cycles in economic time series has a long history, with the use of linear trends and moving averages forming the basic tool kit of economists until the 1970s. Several developments in econometrics then led to an overhaul of the techniques used to extract trends and cycles from time series. Terence Mills introduces these various approaches to allow students and researchers to appreciate the variety of techniques and the considerations that underpin their choice for modelling trends and cycles.
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Book Description

New analysis and empirical evidence on several topics such as the determinants of shape and nature of the vertical relationships in the food system, the determinants of vertical co-ordination and competition, types and mechanisms of co-ordination as well as the consequences for competitiveness, consumer welfare and policy implications are provided. The focus is on vertical issues at different stages of the food chain with a particular emphasis on the increasing role played by retailers in shaping the vertical relationships in the food system through the development of food supply-chain management. ... Read more

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The concept of fair division is as old as civil society itself. Aristotle's "equal treatment of equals" was the first step toward a formal definition of distributive fairness. The concept of collective welfare, more than two centuries old, is a pillar of modern economic analysis. Reflecting fifty years of research, this book examines the contribution of modern microeconomic thinking to distributive justice. Taking the modern axiomatic approach, it compares normative arguments of distributive justice and their relation to efficiency and collective welfare.

The book begins with the epistemological status of the axiomatic approach and the four classic principles of distributive justice: compensation, reward, exogenous rights, and fitness. It then presents the simple ideas of equal gains, equal losses, and proportional gains and losses. The book discusses three cardinal interpretations of collective welfare: Bentham's "utilitarian" proposal to maximize the sum of individual utilities, the Nash product, and the egalitarian leximin ordering. It also discusses the two main ordinal definitions of collective welfare: the majority relation and the Borda scoring method.

The Shapley value is the single most important contribution of game theory to distributive justice. A formula to divide jointly produced costs or benefits fairly, it is especially useful when the pattern of externalities renders useless the simple ideas of equality and proportionality. The book ends with two versatile methods for dividing commodities efficiently and fairly when only ordinal preferences matter: competitive equilibrium with equal incomes and egalitarian equivalence. The book contains a wealth of empirical examples and exercises. ... Read more

Book Description

Binary Economics presents a new paradigm which founds a practical new economics and a unifying new politics that enable people to understand and realize their essential rights and responsibilities in a market economy. This paradigm recognizes that capital has a potent productive and distributive relationship to growth, and by democratically extending the efficient means to acquire capital to all people using the earnings of capital on market principles, binary economics offers many important benefits beyond those provided by conventional economics. The authors present this concept as new hope for solving seemingly intractable problems of economic efficiency, distribution, and justice not solved by conventional economic theories and practices, while enabling people to understand and realize their essential rights and responsibilities in a market economy. The binary paradigm allows cooperation with governments to make modest reforms to existing capital markets so that all people can acquire capital using the earnings of capital and offering the market foundation for many important benefits, including substantial, sustainable growth; more equal opportunity and social justice; increased earning power for the poor, working and middle class people; a greener environment; individual autonomy; strong families and communities; strengthened democracy; and voluntary control of population levels. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Where's the Beef?
Will this be able to be applied without damaging social security?If not, it may become a cover for a new method of Bushwah theft of social secrity aimed at delivering it to Wall Street!I met Kelso in the 60s & Adler before that, and I gave Kelso a platform, too, so I have heard it all before. If you can't say how it goes into effect without hurting seniorsFORGEDDA BOUT IT! Get to the POINT FASTER!!! ~~~ Matt Clarke in Rockland Maine 594-6453

An original and persuasive argument for a true Third Way.
If anyone deserves a Nobel Prize for Economics, Robert Ashford and Rodney Shakespeare do for their original, scholarly and persuasive case in support of the late Louis Kelso's binary theory of economics. Many other writers on"worker ownership," "broad-based capital ownership,"and "participatory economics" have trivialized and marginalizedKelso as "the inventor of the ESOP" and as merely anotheradvocate of "the ownership solution" to the flaws of globalcapitalism.(One notable exception is William Greider, who gives anundistorted description of Kelso's paradigm in his 1997 best-seller ONEWORLD, READY OR NOT: THE MANIC LOGIC OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM.)

Ashfordand Shakespeare should be congratulated for recognizing Louis Kelso as amajor contributor to economic theory and the architect of a unified systemof economics.Kelso's system, first articulated in his 1958 classic THECAPITALIST MANIFESTO co-authored with philosopher Mortimer Adler, combinesthe elegance of classical market theory and moral philosophy with thehighest spiritual values.Ashford and Shakespeare pinpoint where AdamSmith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes fell short theoretically by notrecognizing the increasing productiveness of capital as the main source ofeconomic growth and the most logical source of widespread incomedistribution.This conceptual omission is embedded in all conventionalschools of economic thought, from left to right.Consequently, feweconomic theorists can ever make accurate predictions about the future oroffer sound long-range solutions to meet the dangers of economicglobalization.

Binary economics states that in a genuinely free marketeconomy, people should be able to contribute to and gain their incomes fromthe economic process, based on both their labor and their capital inputs. Most neo-classical and Keynesian economists would dismiss this postulate asabsurd, asserting that capitalism already operates this way. Louis Kelsoand the authors of BINARY ECONOMICS, however, show that institutionalbarriers to broad-based ownership limit most people to earning theirincomes through their labor alone. Consequently the market system breaksdown, as government is forced to interfere with the market mechanism andredistribute incomes to non-owning working people and theunemployed.

The authors explain why neither Wall Street capitalism northe many versions of socialism can ever achieve economic or social justice. Ashford and Shakespeare argue that so-called "free market"policies alone cannot achieve sustainable growth, and explain why thewealth gap continues to widen dangerously between nations and between therich and poor within all nations.They point to a system beyond capitalismand socialism that provides every person, as a fundamental right ofcitizenship, with equal access to capital credit and other "socialgoods" needed to become owners of capital.Their new paradigmprovides:

--a new understanding of the relationship between humans andthings as they work together to produce goods and services;

--a newexplanation for industrial growth, poverty and affluence; and

--a newstrategy for achieving general affluence for all people on free marketprinciples.

Few people would disagree with the authors that theso-called "free market" would be better termed the "un-freemarket."As they point out, a free and open market cannot workefficiently or justly under conditions where (1) workers have only theirlabor to sell in a free global marketplace, (2) ownership of productivecapital globally is concentrated into the hands of a small ownership class,(3) the productive efforts and labor incomes of propertyless workers remainthreatened globally by labor-displacing technology and by workers willingto accept lower wages, and (4) exclusionary barriers to more equalownership opportunities remain in our laws and institutions.

Thestrength of this readable book is its sharp focus on economic theory.Thebook touches only lightly on the moral and political dimensions of binaryeconomics.For a deeper discussion on those issues, the reader should turndirectly to Kelso's writings and to the compendium of articles (includingone by Kelso and another by Ashford) presented in the book, CURING WORLDPOVERTY: THE NEW ROLE OF PROPERTY, John H. Miller, ed., published in 1994by Social Justice Review (St. Louis).

To move toward the goal ofgeneral affluence within the new ownership paradigm, the authors advocate a"binary infrastructure" including principled yet practical socialpolicies and "social tools," suchas:

--"constituency" vehicles, like ESOPs, using testedprinciples of corporate finance to connect all citizens to capital creditas a new and fundamental right of citizenship;

--a tax system andcorporate policies that encourage the full payout of corporateprofits;

--capital credit insurance and re-insurance as a substitute forcollateral; and

--a flexible but disciplined monetary policy whichliberates future growth from the slavery of past savings.

Iwholeheartedly endorse this book as required reading for all serious andopen-minded students of economics.It is especially valuable for allpolicymakers who have not yet become, in the words of Keynes, unwitting"slaves of some defunct economist."

ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mr. Kurland, a lawyer-economist and president of the Center for Economicand Social Justice was Louis Kelso's Washington-basedpolitical strategist for 11 years, following years of work in civil rightsand the War on Poverty. In 1974, he and Kelso persuaded Senator RussellLong to champion legislation to promote employee stock ownership plans or "ESOPs." Among the expanded ownership models Kurland designed wasthe world's first 100% leveraged ESOP buyout, and the first ESOP in adeveloping country. Mr. Kurland was appointed by President Reagan in 1985as deputy chairman of the bipartisan Presidential Task Force on ProjectEconomic Justice, formed to promote Kelsonian reforms in US assistanceprograms to developing economies.

This clarification of Binary Theory is of historic import.
The second chapter of Dr. Brian Greene's wonderful recent book, THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, begins with the following passages."In June 1905, twenty-six-year old Albert Einstein submitted a technical article to theANNALS OF PHYSICS in which he came to grips with a paradox about light thathad first troubled him as a teenager, some ten years earlier.Upon turningthe final page of Einstein's manuscript, the editor of the journal, MaxPlanck, realized that the accepted scientific order had beenoverthrown."If one completes a thorough reading of BINARYECONOMICS:THE NEW PARADIGM without a very similar sense of historic import,a second reading, at the very least, is likely in order.As anindependent researcher with pronounced interests in some of the morerarified limits of current scientific inquiry such as superstring theory,complex adaptive systems, nanotechnology, genome studies, biophysics andsignificant recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, I am often ledto contemplate the longer term social and economic implications of theoften breath taking advances being quietly but incessantly developed in theacademic, corporate and government research labs of this country and aroundthe world.Perhaps because of the persistent background hum of theseruminations, a somewhat more than avocational, but less than careerspecialized interest in history and economic theory has been cultivatedbetween the previously mentioned preoccupations.I mention all of this byway of attempting to place in some context why I regard the subject of thisnew book to be SO enormously important.Again, the book to which Irefer is entitled, BINARY ECONOMICS:THE NEW PARADIGM, by Robert A. Ashfordand Rodney Shakespeare.In doing considerable associated reading in theBinary literature, it becomes stunning and disturbing to learn that aconceptual breakthrough of the absolutely transparent significance of boththe Kelsonian distinction between productivity, traditionally defined, andbinary productiveness, AND the insight that capital is INDEPENDENTLYproductive, with all of the profound distributive, legal, social, economicinstitutional implications attendant to this insight, has apparently beenmarginalized by the prevailing academic and policy priesthood for so longand so lamely.One cannot help but be reminded of other work ofhistoric importance originally dismissed and ignored; reminded thatMendel's work in heredity had to be revived from the void of indifferenceand inattention long after his death; more recently, in the field ofbiophysics, one is reminded of how the brilliant, profound and almostcertainly far prescient work of the great Russian scientist, AlexanderGurwitsch, has been lost in the same void.Historians of science wouldundoubtedly enumerate scores of other cases, with, however, a significantdifference, in my opinion. Rarely, I would venture, has there ever beensuch a high risk in the benefits denied to society for such instances ofbias, academic politics, and/or insight envy as there is now for continuingto dismiss outright or trivialize as 'fadish' (as Professor Samuelsonapparently once did with respect to Binary Theory) the core theoreticalinsights and institutional prescriptions of this theory.Messrs. Ashfordand Shakespeare set out to redress such oversight with respect to BinaryTheory in this book and compellingly succeed.In fact, I would gofurther than this.When one considers the technologies arising, or likelyto arise from many of the areas of research alluded to earlier, thenatural, indeed the blatantly obvious, resonance with the Binary concept ofthe independent productiveness of capital is SO pronounced that therebegins to emerge a sense of near historical inevitability to an ultimaterecognition of legitimacy, and policy implementation of a Binary adaptedmarket system. In such a context, one finds oneself not merelyinspired by the possibilities, but increasingly incensed at the obdurateclinging to denial that threatens the sooner fulfillment ofsuchpotentially overwhelming social and economic benefits,which there is nogood reason to short circuit.Upon completing this work, one is leftfeeling that it is time to join Messrs. Ashford and Shakespeare inintellectually rolling up our sleeves, as it were, and energeticallygetting about the business of transcending the complacency that rings itshands over issues of distributional inequity but can't imagine any policyalternative not sanctioned by the big daddy of conventionalREdistributional wisdom.One is left with a powerful conviction that thelate Louis Kelso has provided us with the fundamental conceptualbreakthroughs that many have long intuitively sensed were needed to elevatedistributional mechanisms to a more complete level of theoreticalcomprehensiveness and institutional efficacy that, I believe, the rarifiedtechnologies of the future will nearly compel.In BINARY ECONOMICS:THE NEWPARADIGM, I believe that Messrs. Ashford and Shakespeare have thrown down agauntlet of challenge that will place a very weighty scholastic burden onthe equivocators for the conventional wisdom.Finally, I believe that thiswork is FAR too important to merely leave to the vagaries of a salvagingretrieval from the void by some hopefully more attentive future. Especially at a time when major national elections loom, and issues of realsubstance are all too often AWOL, this work deserves the most attentiveconsideration by every interested citizen, theoretician, and politico.

A New Approach toEconomic Justice and Efficiency
Binary Economics:The New Paradigm, by Robert Ashford and Rodney Shakespeare deserves a careful reading by anyone concerned with growth and economic justice.In so-called free market economies, as they arepresently constituted, the great benefits of economic growth (which are inturn the consequence of the pace of technological advance) do not accrue tomost poor and working people, though it is poor and working people who bearthe cost of such technological advance in the instabilities anddisplacement it engenders.Rather, the great benefits of that economicgrowth go primarily to the wealthy few who, through their ownership ofstock, exercise a claim on corporate earnings.The result is a growingdisparity in wealth and opportunity that is doing great harm to society. Many have tried to address this problem;but as yet, conventional thinkinghas failed to produce a working consensus on what can and should be done tocreate a more just and efficient economic playing field.InBinaryEconomics:The New Paradigm, in very readable prose, Robert Ashford andRodney Shakespeare carefully advance a wholly voluntary means of enablingincreasing numbers of poor and working men and women also to exercise aviable claim on the growing benefits of technological advance (and hence ofeconomic growth) as a normal function within the framework of a marketeconomy.Their proposed system builds on existing principles of corporatefinance, insurance and monetary policy, making only modest and whollydemocratic changes intended to facilitate capital acquisition for allpeople.Whether the voluntary operation of a binary economy will producethe growth, distributive justice, and other benefits predicted by binaryeconomists remains to be seen; but the binary proposals and predictionscannot be responsibly dismissed on the strength of conventional economictheory, which itself has yet to solve, let alone explain, the problem thatAshford and Shakespeare address.Theirs is a noble goal, and the newdiscourse they seek to initiate, focused on achieving a more equitabledistribution of wealth by way of voluntary transactions and withoutdistribution, is of the utmost importance. People concerned abouteconomic justice and efficiency cannot credibly claim to be open to newsolutions and yet ignore this book. ... Read more

Book Description

Aggregation lies at the heart of macroeconomics. Economists using such aggregates as capital, investment, labor, and even output or GNP assume that such constructions have a sound analytic foundation. The question of the existence of aggregate production functions is not only part of the foundation of macroeconomic theory and policy but also played a central role in the "Cambridge vs. Cambridge" debate, which challenged long-held assumptions about the foundations of neoclassical microeconomics.

In this third collection of his essays Franklin M. Fisher settles the question of the conditions for the existence of aggregate production functions. He examines the conditions for approximate aggregation and, through simulation experiments, considers why aggregate production functions appear to work in practice. He also explores related topics involving price aggregation and aggregation in international trade.

Franklin M. Fisher is Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His collected essays have been published in Econometrics: Essays in Theory and Applications and in Industrial Organization, Economics and the Law.

John Monz is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at MIT. ... Read more

Book Description

For a full description, see catalog entry for Taylor, Economics 4/e.

Book Description

Robert Solow is widely regarded as one of the greatest living economists. He has conducted path-breaking work in both microeconomics and macroeconomics, is the best-selling author of numerous publications, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1987. In Monopolistic Competition and Macroeconomic Theory, Professor Solow gives a nontechnical account of the implications of monopolistic competition on macroeconomic theory and shows that simple and tractable micro-based models can offer the possibility of a richer and more intuitive macroeconomics. ... Read more

Book Description

This book studies the implications of macroeconomic complementarities for aggregate behavior. The presentation is intended to introduce Ph.D. students into this sub-field of macroeconomics and to serve as a reference for more advanced scholars.The initial sections of the book cover the basic framework of complementarities and provide a discussion of the experimental evidence on the outcome of coordination games. The subsequent sections of the book investigate applications of these ideas for macroeconomics. The topics Professor Cooper explores include: economies with production complementarities, search models, imperfectly competitive product markets, models of timing and delay and the role of government in resolving and creating coordination problems. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Essential Reading on Macroeconomic and Financial Instability
This is an essential book for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of macroeconomic and financial instability: recessions, depressions, financial panics, currency crises, bank runs, the Russian and Asian crises, andsimilar events.It also presents fundamental analysis critical to theunderstanding of monetary and fiscal policy coordination; for example inthe European Union, and in dealing with the Asian macroeconomic andfinancial crisis.In addition, it is essential reading for students andenthusiasts of game theory.The book is very well organized, has anunerring eye in its coverage of topics, and is almost astonishingly wellwritten.While parts of the book are technically demanding for the layreader, the rest can be read with profit by the non-specialist andnon-student.Indeed, the technical parts can still profitably be skimmed,and the gist of the ideas are clear to the patient non-specialist.Hence,exactly as advertised, the book is essential for graduate courses, but alsouseful as a reference for the specialist, and is required reading for theinformed public.Unlike what is suggested in the advertising, however, Iand my colleagues also feel the book can be taught and assigned to advancedundergraduate students, and to the more motivated of the intermediatestudents as well.I will do so.In short, if you haven't read thisbook you are simply out of date.Excellent brief summaries of thismaterial can be found in David Romer's graduate text AdvancedMacroeconomics, McGraw Hill, pp. 294-299, in Jansen, DeLorme and Ekelund'sundergraduate text Intermediate Macroeconomics, West Publishing, pp.412-419, and in John Taylor's introductory undergraduate text Principles ofMacroeconomics, Houghton Mifflin, in the "New Keynesian School"subsection.Background readings appear in N. Mankiw and D. Romer (eds.)New Keynesian Economics, vol. 2, Coordination Failures and Real Rigidities,M.I.T. Press Readings in Econommics (Benjamin Friedman and LawrenceSummers, eds.).But the very best place to learn this essential materialis in this elegant volume by Russell Cooper. ... Read more

Book Description

Property tax revolts have occurred both in the United States and abroad. This book examines the causes and consequences of property tax revolts, focusing on California's experience with Proposition 13. New theoretical approaches and evidence from a comprehensive empirical study are used to highlight the equity and efficiency of property tax systems. Since property taxes are local government's main revenue source, the book includes a comparative study of the evolution of local government following property tax limitations in several states. Finally, the book considers alternatives for reform and lessons to avoid future revolts. ... Read more

Book Description

This Handbook focuses on specific microeconomics applications, rather than on conventional econometric theory.It covers the econometric issues involved in a variety of applied microeconomic problems:The measurement of productivity.Frontier production functions and the measurement of efficiency.Consumer demand.Income inequality and economic welfareEstimation of models of dynamic optimization.Search models and duration data.Quasi-likelihood methods for count data.Analysis of business surveys. ... Read more