Robert Sugden - Böcker

An introduction to the practice of cost-benefit analysis including practical examples to aid the exposition.

The Community of Advantage asks how economists should do normative analysis. Normative analysis in economics has usually aimed at satisfying individuals' preferences. Its conclusions have supported a long- standing liberal tradition of economics that values economic freedom and views markets favourably. However, behavioural research shows that individuals' preferences, as revealed in choices, are often unstable, and vary according to contextual factors that seem irrelevant for welfare. Robert Sugden proposes a reformulation of normative economics that is compatible with what is now known about the psychology of choice.The growing consensus in favour of paternalism and 'nudging' is based on a very different way of reconciling normative economics with behavioural findings. This is to assume that people have well-defined 'latent' preferences which, because of psychologically-induced errors, are not always revealed in actual choices. The economist's job is then to reconstruct latent preferences and to design policies to satisfy them. Challenging this consensus, The Community of Advantage argues that latent preference and error are psychologically ungrounded concepts, and that economics needs to be more radical in giving up rationality assumptions.Sugden advocates a kind of normative economics that does not use the concept of preference. Its recommendations are addressed, not to an imagined 'social planner', but to citizens, viewed as potential parties to mutually beneficial agreements. Its normative criterion is the provision of opportunities for individuals to participate in voluntary transactions. Using this approach, Sugden reconstructs many of the normative conclusions of the liberal tradition. He argues that a well-functioning market economy is an institution that individuals have reason to value, whether or not their preferences satisfy conventional axioms of rationality, and that individuals' motivations in such an economy can be cooperative rather than self-interested.

The potential ease with which transnational corporations can relocate their activities gives them great leverage over individual governments. The authors outline the various policies that the world's major economies have adopted to cope with the unique issues created by transnationals. They reveal that there has been a marked contrast in the level of concern about transnationals' activities across the countries studied, and that this has resulted in significantly different approaches towards transnationals.

First published in 2005, Economics and Social Interaction is a fresh attempt to overcome the traditional inability of economics to deal with interpersonal phenomena that occur within the sphere of markets and productive organizations. It makes use of traditional economic concepts for understanding interpersonal events, while venturing beyond those concepts to give a better account of personalised interactions. In contrast to other books, Economics and Social Interaction offers the reader a rigorous effort at extending economic analysis to a difficult field in a consistent manner, sensitive to insights from other behavioural and social sciences. This collection represents an important contribution to a growing research agenda in the social sciences.

First published in 2005, Economics and Social Interaction is a fresh attempt to overcome the traditional inability of economics to deal with interpersonal phenomena that occur within the sphere of markets and productive organizations. It makes use of traditional economic concepts for understanding interpersonal events, while venturing beyond those concepts to give a better account of personalised interactions. In contrast to other books, Economics and Social Interaction offers the reader a rigorous effort at extending economic analysis to a difficult field in a consistent manner, sensitive to insights from other behavioural and social sciences. This collection represents an important contribution to a growing research agenda in the social sciences.

The book is in three parts with a section of keywords. Part I covers individual choice , Part II examines interactive choice . The final part covers interactive choice .

Game theory is central to modern understandings of how people deal with problems of coordination and cooperation. Yet, ironically, it cannot give a straightforward explanation of some of the simplest forms of human coordination and cooperation--most famously, that people can use the apparently arbitrary features of "focal points" to solve coordination problems, and that people sometimes cooperate in "prisoner's dilemmas." Addressing a wide readership of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, Michael Bacharach here proposes a revision of game theory that resolves these long-standing problems. In the classical tradition of game theory, Bacharach models human beings as rational actors, but he revises the standard definition of rationality to incorporate two major new ideas. He enlarges the model of a game so that it includes the ways agents describe to themselves (or "frame") their decision problems. And he allows the possibility that people reason as members of groups (or "teams"), each taking herself to have reason to perform her component of the combination of actions that best achieves the group's common goal.Bacharach shows that certain tendencies for individuals to engage in team reasoning are consistent with recent findings in social psychology and evolutionary biology. As the culmination of Bacharach's long-standing program of pathbreaking work on the foundations of game theory, this book has been eagerly awaited. Following Bacharach's premature death, Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden edited the unfinished work and added two substantial chapters that allow the book to be read as a coherent whole.

Since the 1980s, there has been explosive growth in the use of experimental methods in economics, leading to exciting developments in economic theory and policy. Despite this, the status of experimental economics remains controversial. In Experimental Economics, the authors draw on their experience and expertise in experimental economics, economic theory, the methodology of economics, philosophy of science, and the econometrics of experimental data to offer a balanced and integrated look at the nature and reliability of claims based on experimental research. The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments, and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into a genuinely empirical science. They explain that progress is being held back by an uncritical acceptance of folk wisdom regarding how experiments should be conducted, a failure to acknowledge that different objectives call for different approaches to experimental design, and a misplaced assumption that principles of good practice in theoretical modeling can be transferred directly to experimental design.Experimental Economics debates how such limitations might be overcome, and will interest practicing experimental economists, nonexperimental economists wanting to interpret experimental research, and philosophers of science concerned with the status of knowledge claims in economics.