How far an Austrian law and economics should be Posnerian?

The purpose of this note is to stress that Posner??s conception of law and of the role of judges in a legal system might be problematic for an Austrian approach to law and economics, despite the praxeological dimension of his analysis.     

The irrelevance of normative considerations for founding an Austrian law and economics: Reply to Marciano

In a comment on my paper, ??An Austrian approach to law and economics, with special reference to superstition?? (Leeson 2012), Marciano contends that Posnerian foundations ??may be problematic for an Austrian approach to law and economics??. In this reply I argue that the differences between Posner and Austrians that Marciano uses as the basis for his contention are normative. If, as Austrians claim, Austrian economics is purely positive, those differences are irrelevant to the appropriate foundations for an Austrian law and economics. They pose no problem for a Posnerian founding.     

Reappraising Austrian Economics' Basic Tenets in the Light of Aristotelian Ideas

This paper sustains that reappraising Austrian economics in the light of Aristotelian ideas is not only possible but also fruitful. First, I draw a sketch of the essential features of Austrian economics. Next, I argue about the necessity for a thorough analysis of the notion of freedom, and I analyze Mises' conception. Next, I expose Aristotle's social, epistemological and economic thought related to Austrian main traits. An account of how the exercise of Aristotelian virtues may be synergic with economic coordination and a sketch of the consequences of the proposal on the teaching of economics are then provided. Finally, the conclusion shortly sums up the content and relevance of Aristotle's contribution.     

Value and exchange in law and economics: Buchanan versus posner

Meir Kohn’s Exchange and Value claims that economics can be organised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterize the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as “law and economics”. We compare and contrasts the perspectives proposed by two prominent scholars—James Buchanan and Richard Posner—and argue that they, respectively, represent the exchange and the value paradigm in law and economics. More precisely, we show that Buchanan sticks to a definition of economics based on the exchange paradigm, and this leads him to define law and economics in a rather specific, different, narrower than Posner’s way to define law and economics—a definition that corresponds to a conception of economics based on the value paradigm.     

Exchange and evolution

This paper offers an extension of the distinction of [Kohn, Cato Journal, 24:303–339 (2004)] between the two paradigms of modern economic theory—value and exchange—as derived from the generic–operant framework of [Dopfer and Potts, The general theory of economic evolution, Routledge, London, (2007)]. I argue that Austrian and evolutionary economics can be analytically unified about a general framework of rule coordination and change that I shall call the generic value paradigm. This is an analytic generalization of Kohn’s “exchange paradigm” that will allow us to redefine his conception of the “value paradigm” as the operational value paradigm in terms of the economics of known and fully exploited opportunities. The generic value paradigm, in turn, underpins the economics of the growth of knowledge and the evolution of the economic order as an open-system process due to the origination, adoption, and retention of novel generic rules. Austrian economics is then circumscribed as a special case of the more general “generic” analysis of the coordination and evolution of economic rules.      

Exploring Coase’s world: an introduction

The Nobel Laureate Ronald H. Coase has occupied a central place in the law and economics approach to the analysis of institutions. Many Coasean topics have been discussed and debated over almost a century. Yet, ‘deconstructing’ Professor Coase’s contributions leaves a legacy of further refining the economic meaning of property rights, the predictive role of transaction costs for institutional dynamics, and the nature of governance in the modern firm.     

Chasing Phantoms in a Hollow Defense of Coase

Patrick Gunning refuses to acknowledge the most salient arguments against the Chicago law and economics case for negligence made by Austrian economists. Because of this, he makes the same errors in his defense of Coase that permeate the Chicago paradigm. In particular, his defense of Coasean type analysis completely ignores Austrian cost theory, i.e., that all economically relevant costs are strictly subjective and therefore conceptually impossible to measure. He also fails to grasp the implications of disequilibrium market process theory for the use of any kind of least-cost-avoider rule in the economic analysis of the law. As a result, Gunning's defense of Coase suffers from the same pretense of knowledge as the analysis that he is defending.     

The Property System in Austrian Economics: Ronald Coase's Contribution

This paper argues that contrary to Roy Cordato's claim, Ronald Coase's work on the problem of social cost is an important contribution to Austrian economics. Coase identified a criterion that can be used to establish initial legal rights to control actions that have external effects. In other words, he discovered a criterion that, in some cases, can be directly applied to help establish a property system when there is none. The criterion also helps a government adapt, or maintain, a property system in light of continuing changes that are characteristic of the entrepreneur economy. Cordato's anti-state ethical economics, which he used to criticize Coase, is a deviation from the century-old tradition of Austrian economics. Menger, Mises and Hayek saw economics as a body of logical knowledge that is value free. In addition they recognized a role for government in defining legal rights and in maintaining the property system in light of changing conditions. Accordingly, it is wrong to invoke Austrian economics, properly understood, to criticize this aspect of Coase's work. In this paper, I argue that Cordato has followed a deviant and troubling path by trying to construct an Austrian economics based on ethics, that he has failed to understand that a changeable property system is a prerequisite for the market economy, and that he has correspondingly failed to recognize Coase's contribution to the problem of how to maintain the property system in light of continuing change.     

Examining social processes with agent-based models

It is plain that the Austrian revival that began in the 1970s has yet to succeed in convincing the mainstream of the academy to jettison their physics-based mathematical models in favor of the sort of models and forms of argumentation that contemporary Austrians advocate. Agent-based computational modeling is still in its relative infancy but is beginning to gain recognition among economists disenchanted with the neoclassical paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to assuage concerns that readers might have regarding methodological consistency between agent-based modeling and Austrian economics and to advocate its adoption as a means to convey Austrian ideas to a wider audience. I examine models developed and published by other researchers and ultimately provide an outline of how one might develop a research agenda that leverages this technique. I argue that agent-based modeling can be used to enhance Austrian theorizing and offers a viable alternative to the neoclassical paradigm.     

Viewpoint: On the generalizability of lab behaviour to the field

Abstract.  We can think of no question more fundamental to experimental economics than understanding whether, and under what circumstances, laboratory results generalize to naturally occurring environments. In this paper, we extend Levitt and List (2006) to the class of games in which financial payoffs and 'doing the right thing' are not necessarily in conflict. We argue that behaviour is crucially linked to not only the preferences of people, but also the properties of the situation. By doing so, we are able to provide a road map of the psychological and economic properties of people and situations that might interfere with generalizability of laboratory result from a broad class of games.     

The Institutional Barriers to Heterodox Pluralism

This paper applies the feminist concept of epistemological communities to the project of promoting pluralism in the economics discipline. I argue that the economics profession does not resemble a unified and coherent epistemological community and is better viewed as many different yet overlapping and intersecting smaller communities. I argue that this reimaging of the community of economists implies a different conception of pluralism. In an environment where theory is developed at different intersections of epistemological communities, pluralism requires distinguishing between the public process of debate that provides critical evaluation of knowledge claims and the private process of determining what is published and it requires different strategies for evaluating work for publication.     

Ronald Coase and law and economics in Europe

Ronald Coase himself never wrote about law and economics in Europe. Yet many of his insights about the development of the discipline in the United States are extremely useful to our understanding of the methodological and practical challenges faced by European law and economics (as in most civil law jurisdictions). This paper argues that a careful consideration of Coase’s insights might address some of the current limitations.     

The Austrian theory of the firm: Retrospect and prospect

Using as a focusing device the famous arguments of Coase (Economica 4(16), 386–405 1937) and Hayek (The American Economic Review 35(4): 519–530 1945), I sketch in bold strokes what an Austrian theory of the firm would look like. Such a theory would pay serious attention to issues of knowledge, uncertainty, change, and complementarity. I describe a literature in which much of this theory has already been constructed; make connections to closely related literatures in economics and management; and suggest directions for future development.     

Is the economics of time and ignorance a “classic”?

A history of economic thought perspective on The Economics of Time and Ignorance reveals that the book rehabilitates some major themes in the Austrian tradition that were all but lost subsequent to the formalist revolution in economics that took place in the middle of the twentieth-century. The book also anticipates some important ideas that were extended and applied in Austrian economics after it was first published. Reviews have claimed that the book was a “classic” and also “original”. The book is too close in a temporal sense to judge whether or not future generations will canonize it as a “classic”. Using Stigler’s criteria as to what constitutes scientific “originality”, it is concluded that, taken as a whole, the book was not original. From the vantage point of the overall discipline of economics, it was a work advancing controversial ideas that would not easily change the beliefs, practices and interests of economists in general but it offered sound reasons for taking the Austrian thought-trajectory more seriously. It would be more fitting to view the authors as providers of many innovations contributing to the mature Austrian economics of the twenty-first century.     

Schütz and the Rational Choice Debate in African Economics

Neo-Austrians in the USA have produced a specific interpretation of Schütz as a mediator between the Austrian school of economics and European phenomenology or phenomenological sociology. Seeing Schütz as a political and economic scientist who, moreover, could give a new orientation to African political economy is at stake in our contribution. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to filling in a gap between my interest for African development economics and Austrian-Schützian economics. By doing so, I want to contribute to the efforts of the NIE school, which aims at challenging the previous neo-classical approach of the World Bank intervention in Africa.     

Menger’s causal-realist analysis in modern economics

Carl Menger pioneered a unique theoretical research method which served as the foundation of the early Austrian school of economics. Menger’s causal-realist analysis was revived and formalized just before and after World War 2 by Ludwig von Mises as the “praxeological method.” Murray Rothbard, a student of von Mises’, utilized the method in formulating a comprehensive system of economic theory in his treatise, Man Economy, and State published in the early 1960s. Rothbard’s treatise became the foundational work for the “Austrian revival” in the 1970s. In this paper, we address several issues related to the role of Menger’s method in modern economics. First, ample evidence is adduced that von Mises and Rothbard each expressed a surprising ambivalence with respect to his own work in relation to the early Austrian school. Second, von Mises viewed Rothbard’s treatise as beginning a new epoch in economic theory. Third, contrary to the conventional view, a careful analysis of his treatise shows that Rothbard drew heavily on the contemporary neoclassical literature in developing his theoretical system and that his intent was never to set up a heterodox movement to challenge mainstream economics. Rather, his main aim was to consistently apply the praxeological method to rescue economics from what he considered the alien methodology of positivism, which was imported into economics after World War 2. Lastly, I will tentatively suggest that the term “Austrian economics” as the designation for the intellectual movement that coalesced in the early 1970s may now have outlived its usefulness. This term, which initially served an important strategic purpose in promoting the revival of the broad Mengerian tradition, may have come to obscure the meaning and importance of the praxeological research paradigm that Menger originated.     

Trust as belief or behavior?

Despite its proposed importance for economic performance, there seems to be little agreement on what trust really is. In economics, trust is generally viewed as a belief regarding the action that is to be expected from others. This contrasts with the view that trust is a way of acting. In his influential book on the nature of explanation in the social sciences, Jon Elster argues that trusting is to act with few precautions. I argue that it is possible to reconcile these seemingly conflicting views about trust. I develop a simple model of trust where both beliefs and precautions play an important role – and where Elster’s understanding of trust can be viewed as a special case.     

1985: A defining year in the history of modern Austrian economics

Mises and Hayek in the 1920s and 1940s thought of their work as within the orthodoxy of economic science. But after WWII it became increasingly obvious that the contributions of Mises and Hayek were out of step with the way the economics profession was evolving. But starting in 1974, due to the organizational efforts of Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, and bolstered by the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science to FA Hayek, a resurgence of interest in Austrian economics by young scholars was initiated. Starting in 1984, but significantly in 1985, the work of the new generation of Austrian economics started to have an impact in the mainstream outlets in terms of journals and university presses. We argue that this is a defining year in the modern history of the Austrian school and that it reflected both the quality of work being done by the new generation as well as a methodological crisis within the mainstream of economic scholarship. Don Lavoie’s work in comparative economics, as well as his work in methodology, reflected this shift within the economic conversation.     

Nobelity and novelty: Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott’s contributions viewed from Vienna

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2004 to Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott represents an opportunity to evaluate their contributions in light of Austrian economics. We lay out the basics of their contributions—the general equilibrium approach to economic fluctuations and the game theoretic approach to policy—and argue that they have tenets similar to those of Austrianism. We argue that their methodology parallels Austrian methodology in several significant ways that have gone unnoticed. We conclude that Kydland and Prescott’s Nobel Prize suggests Austrian approaches can have a more prominent impact than they have had in the past.