Understanding the behaviour of individuals and firms is at the heart of evolutionary economics, and also of related fields such as behavioural economics, management, and psychology. This book brings together a set of cutting-edge theoretical and empirical contributions addressing individual agents and their interaction, the evolution of firm organization, as well as the interplay of firm dynamics and regional development.
The current economy is more complex and surprising than ever before: global and local factors combine to shape a very diverse framework, where organizations and management practices are challenged. This book presents a selection of studies that deal with economic behavior, both at the macro and micro level. It presents some well-defined aspects and builds on a new understanding of decision-making and economic development based on ethics and knowledge. It also emphasizes the human factor in shaping business and economic strategies as part of the international competition and interdependencies.
Conflict, disaster, and destruction—despite their historical and current significance—have not yet been adequately studied from the economic point of view. Economic Behaviour in Adversity brings together ten important essays, several previously unpublished, dealing with the choices people make in times of disaster and conflict. These essays help explain the possibilities and limits of human cooperation under severe environmental pressure. Part I, "Disaster and Recovery," contains previously unpublished studies of major historical catastrophes, among them the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the Civil War in Russia that followed the Bolshevik revolution, and the mass bombing of Germany and of Japan during World War II. Accompanying the historical studies are several analytical papers that interpret the disaster experience. The essays in Part II, "Cooperation and Conflict," represent innovative theoretical analyses based on a common theme—that cooperation and conflict are alternative strategies whereby individuals, groups, and different forms of social organization struggle with one another for evolutionary survival. Ultimately, these essays indicate, the political economy of the human species is an instance of Darwin's "economy of nature."
This volume highlights the importance of replicating previous economic experiments for understanding the robustness and generalizability of behavior. Readers will gain a better understanding of the role that replication plays in scientific discovery as well as valuable insights into the robustness of previously reported findings.
This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, when Princeton University Press published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences.
Handbook of Behavioral Economics: Foundations and Applications presents the concepts and tools of behavioral economics. Its authors are all economists who share a belief that the objective of behavioral economics is to enrich, rather than to destroy or replace, standard economics. They provide authoritative perspectives on the value to economic inquiry of insights gained from psychology. Specific chapters in this first volume cover reference-dependent preferences, asset markets, household finance, corporate finance, public economics, industrial organization, and structural behavioural economics. This Handbook provides authoritative summaries by experts in respective subfields regarding where behavioral economics has been; what it has so far accomplished; and its promise for the future. This taking-stock is just what Behavioral Economics needs at this stage of its so-far successful career. - Helps academic and non-academic economists understand recent, rapid changes in theoretical and empirical advances within behavioral economics - Designed for economists already convinced of the benefits of behavioral economics and mainstream economists who feel threatened by new developments in behavioral economics - Written for those who wish to become quickly acquainted with behavioral economics
In the last decade, behavioral economics, borrowing from psychology and sociology to explain decisions inconsistent with traditional economics, has revolutionized the way economists view the world. But despite this general success, behavioral thinking has fundamentally transformed only one field of applied economics-finance. Peter Diamond and Hannu Vartiainen's Behavioral Economics and Its Applications argues that behavioral economics can have a similar impact in other fields of economics. In this volume, some of the world's leading thinkers in behavioral economics and general economic theory make the case for a much greater use of behavioral ideas in six fields where these ideas have already proved useful but have not yet been fully incorporated--public economics, development, law and economics, health, wage determination, and organizational economics. The result is an attempt to set the agenda of an important development in economics--an agenda that will interest policymakers, sociologists, and psychologists as well as economists. Contributors include Ian Ayres, B. Douglas Bernheim, Truman F. Bewley, Colin F. Camerer, Anne Case, Michael D. Cohen, Peter Diamond, Christoph Engel, Richard G. Frank, Jacob Glazer, Seppo Honkapohja, Christine Jolls, Botond Koszegi, Ulrike Malmendier, Sendhil Mullainathan, Antonio Rangel, Emmanuel Saez, Eldar Shafir, Sir Nicholas Stern, Jean Tirole, Hannu Vartiainen, and Timothy D. Wilson.
Many fields are beginning to implement developing practices that prove to be more efficient and environmentally friendly compared to traditional practices. This holds true for the realm of business, as organizations are redesigning their operations through the incorporation of sustainable methods. Research is needed on the specific techniques companies are using to promote efficiency and improved effectiveness using sustainability. Handbook of Research on Sustainable Supply Chain Management for the Global Economy is an essential reference source that discusses the incorporation of sustainability in various facets of business management. Featuring research on topics such as disruptive logistics, production planning, and renewable energy sources, this book is ideally designed for researchers, practitioners, students, managers, policymakers, academicians, economists, scholars, and educators seeking coverage on sustainable practices in supply chains to ensure a cleaner environment.
