Marina Bianchi - Böcker

The Active Consumer discusses how consumers seem to delight in trying new solutions and exploring new combinatory possibilities. This book provides an economic-theoretical understanding of this phenomenon and the many ways in which innovation can structure consumer choice. The authors show from different points of view how central novelty can be in consumer behaviour, how it relates to technical change and how new consumer capabilities are developed and organized.

The theory of consumer choice fills the opening chapters of any micro-economic textbook. Yet, surprisingly, this position of privilege has not translated into a flourishing of economic research that is comparable to what has happened in other branches of economic reasoning. Starting with Menger, the Austrian economic tradition has always shifted the focus of attention from the problem of equilibrium to that of social order, to the evolution of norms, institutions and practices that favor social cooperation and coordination. Within this tradition competition and markets are not viewed as states, but as processes in which change and errors occur and efficiency is reached but also easily lost. The real economic problem becomes a problem of knowledge how it is discovered, how it is transmitted. Consumer's interactions and choices and actual consumption practices play an important role in these evolving forms of sociality. And it is within this framework that allows for experimentation and learning, that they should be studied. This title is part of the "Advances in Austrian Economics" series. It contains a collection of high-level papers on the evolution of consumption.