Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics
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Samuel Bowles, Santa Fe Institute
Weikai Chen, Renmin University of China
Copyright Year:
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Language: English
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Conditions of Use
Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Doing Post-Walrasian Microeconomics
- Strategic Interactions
- Preferences, Beliefs, and Behavior
- Public Goods, Mechanism Design, and the Social Multiplier
- Coordination Failures: A Taxonomy
- Environmental Coordination Failures and Institutional Responses
- Bargaining: Mutual Gains and Conflicts over their Distribution
- Principals and Agents: Contracts, Norms, and Power
- Economic Classes and Incomplete Contracts
- Work and Wages
- Credit Markets and Wealth Constraints
- Risk and Inequality: Redistribution as Insurance
- Inequality: Institutions, Market Structure, and Policy
- Endogenous Preferences: The Evolution of Cooperation
- The Evolution of Conflict over the Distribution of Gains from Cooperation
- Projects: From Learning Economics to Doing Economics
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
About the Book
Microeconomics has been transformed in recent decades by the increasing use of game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary modeling, network economics, mechanism design and attention to limited competition and asymmetric information. Bowles and Chen provide problem sets and exam questions (with carefully explained solutions) based on the new microeconomics, engaging learners with applications to income distribution, limited competition in goods and labor markets, climate change, and other public policy topics.
Background notes explain the underlying concepts, their origin in the thinking of the great economists of the past, applications to macroeconomics, and relevant empirical evidence.
This work provides a problem-based and policy oriented approach to teaching microeconomics, development, labor, environment, public economics and topics in business, management and public policy to upper level undergraduates, masters and doctoral students.
About the Contributors
Authors
Samuel Bowles is at the Santa Fe Institute and is the author of Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution (Princeton, 2006), coauthor of Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination (Oxford, 2022), and The Economy: Microeconomics (CORE Econ, 2024).
Weikai Chen is at the School of Economics, Renmin University of China in Beijing and pursues research on evolutionary modeling, technical change and income distribution.