With the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe, the market is extending its reach and at the same time claiming its universal applicability.

Every decision is a trade. Learn to think about the ones you should do — and the ones you shouldn’t. Trading books generally break down into two categories: the ones which claim to teach you how to make money trading, and the memoir-style books recounting scandals and bad behavior. But the former don't have profitable trades to teach; if they did they'd keep those trades to themselves. And the latter are frequently entertaining, but they don't leave you with much you can apply in your own life. The Laws of Trading is different. All of our relationships and decisions involve trading at some level. This is a book about decision-making through the lens of a professional prop trader. For years, behavioral and cognitive scientists have shown us how human decision-making is flawed and biased. But how do you learn to avoid these problems in day-to-day decisions where you have to react in real-time? What are the important things to think about and to act on? The world needs a book by a prop trader who has lived, breathed and taught trading for a living, drawing upon years of insights on the trading floor in real markets, good and bad, whether going sideways, crashing, or bubbling over. If you can master the decision-making skills needed to profitably trade in modern markets, you can master decision-making in all walks of life. This book will teach you exactly those skills. Introduces, develops, and applies one law per chapter, making it easy not only to remember useful concepts, but also to have them at the ready in any situation. Shows you how to find and think about the “special edge” of your organization, and yourself. Teaches you how to handle the interaction of people with artificially intelligent (AI) machines that make decisions, a skill that is rapidly becoming essential in the AI-driven economy of the future. Includes a "bonus" digital ancillary, an Excel spreadsheet with various worked examples that expand on the scenarios described in the book. Do you need to make rational decisions in a competitive environment? Almost everyone does. This book will teach you the tools that let you do your job better.

Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced. If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made. Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale. The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.

Master the fundamentals, hone your business instincts, and save a fortune in tuition. The consensus is clear: MBA programs are a waste of time and money. Even the elite schools offer outdated assembly-line educations about profit-and-loss statements and PowerPoint presentations. After two years poring over sanitized case studies, students are shuffled off into middle management to find out how business really works. Josh Kaufman has made a business out of distilling the core principles of business and delivering them quickly and concisely to people at all stages of their careers. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. In The Personal MBA, he shares the essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, strategy, and much more. True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed. Read this book and in one week you will learn the principles it takes most people a lifetime to master.

It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

A key factor in the emerging relationship between law and economic globalization is how global competition now shapes economies and societies. Competition law is provided by those players that have sufficient 'power' to apply their laws transnationally. This book examines this important and controversial aspect of globalization.