Consumer Law and Practice provides undergraduate students and those studying the LPC with concise yet comprehensive guidance. It is also a useful aid for practitioners (including those advising businesses) and non-lawyers requiring information which can be quickly understood. Using an innovative problem-solving approach to the subject, we focus on situations in which clients may find themselves and explain how the law deals with such situations. "Between the covers is a mine of information clearly and accurately set out ... a valuable tool for non-specialist and specialist alike." The Law Society's Gazette
Joseph Stiglitz is one of the world’s greatest economists. He has made fundamental contributions to economic theory in areas such as inequality, the implications of imperfect and asymmetric information, and competition, and he has been a major figure in policy making, a leading public intellectual, and a remarkably influential teacher and mentor. This collection of essays influenced by Stiglitz’s work celebrates his career as a scholar and teacher and his aspiration to put economic knowledge in the service of creating a fairer world. Toward a Just Society brings together a range of essays whose breadth reflects how Stiglitz has shaped modern economics. The contributions to this volume, all penned by high-profile authors who have been guided by or collaborated with Stiglitz over the last five decades, span microeconomics, macroeconomics, inequality, development, law and economics, and public policy. Touching on many of the central debates and discoveries of the field and providing insights on the directions that academic economics could take in the future, Toward a Just Society is an extraordinary celebration of the many paths Stiglitz has opened for economics, politics, and public life.
This book provides an eye-opening exposé on economics professors that will surely shock anyone who is not familiar with the topic, and even some of those who are familiar with it. It is critical of the behavior of economics professors, but is not critical of the field of economics itself. In fact, the book argues that it is essential for economics professors to improve in the work they perform, precisely because of the vital importance of their field. Other books that criticize economics professors typically present complex arguments that interest only the most advanced scholars. However, this book is completely different. It is written to be understandable to anyone who has with an interest in economics, regardless of their background. At the same time, the book does include the most relevant scholarly arguments—it just presents them in a manner that allows anyone to understand them. Also unlike other books on economics, How Economics Professors Can Stop Failing Us is written in the context of a genuine exposé. As such, itventures “backstage” behind the “show business” that has dominated the profession, revealing the profession’s deep, dark, (and at times rather ugly) secrets. The book is able to do this by having an author who has experienced first- hand, studied, and written on this topic area for over three decades, who has organized training seminars on it, and who has served for over a decade as the Executive Director of the Association for Integrity and Responsible Leadership in Economics. While exposing the profession’s shameful problems, the book also offers great hope in providing realistic solutions to them. One of the main solutions it proposes is for economics professors who are now failing us to follow, and learn from, those other professors who are not failing us—who have, instead, admirably upheld the principles of professional ethics and scientific integrity. In this sense, How Economics Professors Can Stop Failing Us offers the most hope, and perhaps the only hope, for economics professors to improve, and to play the responsible role that their students, their employers, and society overall, expects of them.
'National Systems of Innovation' presents a new perspective on the dynamics of the national and the global economy. Its starting point is that the international competitiveness of nations is founded on innovation. Which role do different parts of the national system play in determining the long-term dynamics of the economy? What is happening to the coherence of national systems of innovation in an era characterised by far-reaching internationalisation and globalisation? These and other issues are addressed in this volume. Available for the first time in paperback, the book is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy-makers.
This book is intended as a textbook for a course in behavioral economics for advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have already learned basic economics. The book will also be useful for introducing behavioral economics to researchers. Unlike some general audience books that discuss behavioral economics, this book does not take a position of completely negating traditional economics. Its position is that both behavioral and traditional economics are tools that have their own uses and limitations. Moreover, this work makes clear that knowledge of traditional economics is a necessary basis to fully understand behavioral economics. Some of the special features compared with other textbooks on behavioral economics are that this volume has full chapters on neuroeconomics, cultural and identity economics, and economics of happiness. These are distinctive subfields of economics that are different from, but closely related to, behavioral economics with many important overlaps with behavioral economics. Neuroeconomics, which is developing fast partly because of technological progress, seeks to understand how the workings of our minds affect our economic decision making. In addition to a full chapter on neuroeconomics, the book provides explanations of findings in neuroeconomics in chapters on prospect theory (a major decision theory of behavioral economics under uncertainty), intertemporal economic behavior, and social preferences (preferences that exhibit concerns for others). Cultural and identity economics seek to explain how cultures and people’s identities affect economic behaviors, and economics of happiness utilizes measures of subjective well-being. There is also a full chapter on behavioral normative economics, which evaluates economic policies based on findings and theories of behavioral economics.
As most econometricians will readily agree, the data used in applied econometrics seldom provide accurate measurements for the pertinent theory's variables. Here, Bernt Stigum offers the first systematic and theoretically sound way of accounting for such inaccuracies. He and a distinguished group of contributors bridge econometrics and the philosophy of economics--two topics that seem worlds apart. They ask: How is a science of economics possible? The answer is elusive. Economic theory seems to be about abstract ideas or, it might be said, about toys in a toy community. How can a researcher with such tools learn anything about the social reality in which he or she lives? This book shows that an econometrician with the proper understanding of economic theory and the right kind of questions can gain knowledge about characteristic features of the social world. It addresses varied topics in both classical and Bayesian econometrics, offering ample evidence that its answer to the fundamental question is sound. The first book to comprehensively explore economic theory and econometrics simultaneously, Econometrics and the Philosophy of Economics represents an authoritative account of contemporary economic methodology. About a third of the chapters are authored or coauthored by Heather Anderson, Erik Biørn, Christophe Bontemps, Jeffrey A. Dubin, Harald E. Goldstein, Clive W.J. Granger, David F. Hendry, Herman Ruge-Jervell, Dale W. Jorgenson, Hans-Martin Krolzig, Nils Lid Hjort, Daniel L. McFadden, Grayham E. Mizon, Tore Schweder, Geir Storvik, and Herman K. van Dijk.
This symposium brought together leading experts and managers from the public and private sectors who are involved in the creation, dissemination, and use of scientific and technical data and information (STI) to: (1) describe and discuss the role and the benefits and costsâ€"both economic and otherâ€"of the public domain in STI in the research and education context, (2) to identify and analyze the legal, economic, and technological pressures on the public domain in STI in research and education, (3) describe and discuss existing and proposed approaches to preserving the public domain in STI in the United States, and (4) identify issues that may require further analysis.
An exploration of how approaches that draw on evolutionary theory and complexity science can advance our understanding of economics. Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years: one emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions; the other views economies as complex adaptive systems. In this book, leading scholars examine these two bodies of theory, exploring their possible impact on economics. Relevant concepts from evolutionary theory drawn on by the contributors include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a product of gene-culture coevolution. Applicable ideas from complexity theory include self-organization, fractals, chaos theory, sensitive dependence, basins of attraction, and path dependence. The contributors discuss a synthesis of complexity and evolutionary approaches and the challenges that emerge. Focusing on evolutionary behavioral economics, and the evolution of institutions, they offer practical applications and point to avenues for future research. Contributors Robert Axtell, Jenna Bednar, Eric D. Beinhocker, Adrian V. Bell, Terence C. Burnham, Julia Chelen, David Colander, Iain D. Couzin, Thomas E. Currie, Joshua M. Epstein, Daniel Fricke, Herbert Gintis, Paul W. Glimcher, John Gowdy, Thorsten Hens, Michael E. Hochberg, Alan Kirman, Robert Kurzban, Leonhard Lades, Stephen E. G. Lea, John E. Mayfield, Mariana Mazzucato, Kevin McCabe, John F. Padgett, Scott E. Page, Karthik Panchanathan, Peter J. Richerson, Peter Schuster, Georg Schwesinger, Rajiv Sethi, Enrico Spolaore, Sven Steinmo, Miriam Teschl, Peter Turchin, Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh, Sander E. van der Leeuw, Romain Wacziarg, John J. Wallis, David S. Wilson, Ulrich Witt
