Robert G. Chambers - Böcker

For all its elaborate theories and models, economics always reduces to comparisons. Should we build A rather than B? Will I be better off if I eat D rather than C? How much will it cost me to produce F instead of E? At root, the ultimate goal of economics is simple: assessing the alternatives and finding the best possible outcome. This basic mathematical concept underlies all introductions to the field of economics, yet as advanced students progress through the discipline, they often lose track of this foundational idea when presented with real-world complications and uncertainty. In Competitive Agents in Certain and Uncertain Markets, Robert G. Chambers develops an integrated analytic framework for treating consumer, producer, and market equilibrium analyses as special cases of a generic optimization problem. He builds on lessons learned by all beginning students of economics to show how basic concepts can still be applied even in complex and highly uncertain conditions. Drawing from optimization theory, Chambers demonstrates how the same unified mathematical framework applies to both stochastic and non-stochastic decision settings. The book borrows from both convex and variational analysis and gives special emphasis to differentiability, conjugacy theory, and Fenchel's Duality Theorem. Throughout, Chambers includes practical examples, problems, and exercises to make abstract material accessible. Bringing together essential theoretical tools for understanding decision-making under uncertainty, Competitive Agents in Certain and Uncertain Markets provides a unified framework for analyzing a broad range of microeconomic decisions. This book will be an invaluable resource for advanced graduate students and scholars of microeconomic theory.

Lectures on Neoclassical Production Economics is an advanced undergraduate treatment of the fundamental economic model of producer behaviour. It shows how producers, confronted with existing technical possibilities and markets, decide how and what to produce. The book first discusses the roles that models, abstraction, and mathematics play in economic analyses. It then introduces a “canonical model” of “The Technology” as a set of inputs and output that satisfies five basic assumptions. Successive chapters build on this foundation to develop representations of technical possibilities that include production functions, input-requirement functions, input sets, and output sets. A “primer” on the optimal behaviour of price-taking, profit maximizing producers follows. It describes in a rigorous, but accessible, form the optimal producer behaviour using verbal, graphical, and mathematical arguments. Following chapters cover cost functions, revenue functions, and profit functions. These chapters treat the theories of cost-minimizing, revenue-maximizing, and profit-maximizing producers. Concepts covered include cost-minimizing demands, revenue-maximizing supplies, profit maximizing input demands and supplies, Shephard's Lemma, McFadden's Lemma, and Hotelling's Lemma. A chapter on duality then shows that the existence of well-behaved profit function implies the existence of a canonical technology. Distance function representations of input set and output sets are then introduced and their properties are derived. The book discusses: how to use distance functions to derive cost and revenue functions, how to use cost and revenue functions to construct “dual distance functions”, the role that distance functions play in calculating shadow prices, the use of distance functions to measure efficiency, and the use of distance functions to measure relative performance. The final chapter examines the consequences of relaxing the assumptions of the “canonical model” and price-taking producers.

This book contains a modern treatment of production economics from a dual perspective, with special emphasis on recent developments. Results that were scattered throughout professional journals and monographs are now gathered into an integrated approach using a common notation. The book prepares the reader to apply the tools of the dual approach to real world problems and data sets. Particular care has been devoted to choosing topics for discussion that achieve this goal. Throughout the book there are worked examples and exercises, which are geared toward developing the reader's facility in using modern developments in production economics. Separate chapters are devoted to production, cost, and profit functions. Other topics include flexible functional forms, aggregation across inputs and outputs using the theory of separable structures, aggregation over economic optimizing firms, the representation of multioutput technologies, and the analysis and measurement of technical change from both a primal and a dual perspective.

This book demonstrates that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems of consumer choice, the theory of the firm, and principal agent relationships. The authors demonstrate that dual methods apply under uncertainty and that the dual representations can be developed for stochastic technologies. Moreover, proper exploitation of the properties of alternative primal and dual representations of preferences allows analysts to generalize and extend the results of the existing literature on preferences under uncertainty, thus making expected-utility theory largely superfluous for many decisions. These insights open the way for developments in the basic theory of production under uncertainty, the theory of hedging behavior, the analysis of agency problems and the theory of production insurance.

This book demonstrates that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems of consumer choice, the theory of the firm, and principal agent relationships. The authors demonstrate that dual methods apply under uncertainty and that the dual representations can be developed for stochastic technologies. Moreover, proper exploitation of the properties of alternative primal and dual representations of preferences allows analysts to generalize and extend the results of the existing literature on preferences under uncertainty, thus making expected-utility theory largely superfluous for many decisions. These insights open the way for developments in the basic theory of production under uncertainty, the theory of hedging behavior, the analysis of agency problems and the theory of production insurance.