First published in 1998. This work contributes to the discussion of Knight by showing that uncertainty broadens the conception of economic welfare, and that a new cost analysis holds the key to unlocking the Knightian corpus. It develops Knight's suggestion that uncertainty-control costs can be reduced - arguing that the large firm enjoys economic rent from utilizing its dominant vantage point in the market. The author demonstrates that while Knight provides the intellectual stimulus which propelled Chamberlin's thesis of monopolistic competition, Chamberlin uses a very abstract form of uncertainty in his analysis.

First published in 1998. This work contributes to the discussion of Knight by showing that uncertainty broadens the conception of economic welfare, and that a new cost analysis holds the key to unlocking the Knightian corpus. It develops Knight's suggestion that uncertainty-control costs can be reduced - arguing that the large firm enjoys economic rent from utilizing its dominant vantage point in the market. The author demonstrates that while Knight provides the intellectual stimulus which propelled Chamberlin's thesis of monopolistic competition, Chamberlin uses a very abstract form of uncertainty in his analysis.

The papers here range from description and analysis of how our political economy allocates its inventive effort, to studies of the decision making process in specific industrial laboratories. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

For over 50 years economists have argued that where private costs or benefits differ from social costs or benefits - in noise, smells, congestion, pollution of the environment - there is a 'clear case' for government intervention to correct the divergence. This argument has been used to justify almost endless intervention. However, the original analysts of social costs/benefits were led into error by failing to test their propositions against the evidence of real life. Painstaking empirical studies clearly demonstrate these errors. A divergence between private and social cost is no decisive justification for government action to correct it. The costs of intervention often outweigh the social benefits. Moreover, the alleged 'externalities' are merely uncontracted effects. Under private property rights, the use of contracts to transact what have been regarded as 'external' effects is far more common than has been commonly recognised.

Policy uncertainty can reduce individual welfare when individuals have limited opportunities to mitigate or insure against consumption fluctuations induced by the policy uncertainty. For this reason, policy uncertainty surrounding future Social Security benefits may have important welfare costs. We field an original survey to measure the degree of policy uncertainty in Social Security and to estimate the impact of this uncertainty on individual welfare. On average, our survey respondents expect to receive only about 60 percent of the benefits they are supposed to get under current law. We document the wide variation around the expectation for most respondents and the heterogeneity in the perceived distributions of future benefits across respondents. This uncertainty has real costs. Our central estimates show that on average individuals would be willing to forego around 6 percent of the benefits they are supposed to get under current law to remove the policy uncertainty associated with their future benefits. This translates to a risk premium from policy uncertainty equal to 10 percent of expected benefits.

Abstract: This paper proposes a simple index of the welfare significance of uncertainty in the public goods resulting as policy outcomes. Our measure is the ex ante compensation an individual would require to accept an uncertain level of service compared to receiving the expected value of the distribution of possible values for that service. Our compensation measure is a function of the coefficient of relative risk aversion, the variance in the measure of environmental service associated with policy and relevant for the individual, and a set of conventional parameters that describe the properties of nonmarket benefit measures under conditions of certainty. We would expect that the inverse virtual price elasticity of the for the environmental service and the square of the coefficient of relative variation are the primary factors influencing the size of our compensation index