This highly original work offers an intellectual history of four central theories underlying the market economic system, focusing on their conception, evolution, and applications. Four Central Theories of the Market Economy traces the root of the theories, their conception and articulation, as well as their evolutions to the present time. It focuses on the four theories that are generally recognized as fundamental to the discipline of economics: the invisible hand, comparative advantage, the law of markets, and the quantity theory of money. These theories have profoundly influenced the world. Chapters explore their rich intellectual history from classical Greece to today, drawing on the original works of the great economic minds of the classical era and other thinkers who prepared the path for them, as well as those who refined their works or challenged them. This volume will leave the reader with a deep understanding of these pillars of the market economic system in the context of their historical development. This book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of economics who are interested in the intellectual history of their discipline as well as scholars and students of intellectual history who are interested in economics.

This book gathers a collection of multidisciplinary essays by Jess Huerta de Soto, examining the dynamic processes of social cooperation which characterize the market, with particular emphasis on the role of both entrepreneurship and institutions.

Explains the transitions in twentieth-century industrial leadership in terms of changing business investment strategies and organizational structures.

Concerned primarily with oligopoly, this work includes a general study of pricing in three different markets--perfect competition, perfect monopoly, and imperfect competition. The solutions of these markets offered by Cournot, Smithies, Chamberlin, Stackelberg, Fellner, and Robinson are presented mathematically, followed by the author's own version of the theory of rational pricing in oligopoly. Previous authors have not allowed for all the variables arising from profit and price situations in the market. Here, more realistic assumptions and more complex analyses indicate that sellers in oligopoly situations do not always need to arrange specific agreements--hence, that "administered" pricing does not inevitably occur when the market is dominated by a few producers.

Provides a critique of the market economy, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the work of F.A. Hayek.

The social market economy forms a fundamental theory of the market economy and an integrated economic and ethical theory of the economic order in which the political and societal conditions for the working of the market are included in the theory of the market economy. The social market economy is presented as a universal theory of the decisions to be made about the economic order in all cultures and is analysed in its basic theoretical foundations and in its application to the transition process from the planned to the market economy, particulary in the privatisation of socialised property in Russia and former East Germany. Leading German and Russian experts in the field as well as four classical texts present a systematic analysis of the social market economy from the point of view of economics, law, and ethics.