...Ivan Moscati Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making . By Szpiro George . New York : Columbia University Press , 2020 . xii; 250 pp. $32.00 . Copyright 2021 by Duke University Press 2021 Book Reviews 367 Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three...

... as a whole. It is concluded that there were significant affinities in theoretical interest running between MIT economics and other fields at MIT, which revolved around the emergence of macro-scale phenomena out of the dynamic interplay of local decision-making processes. However, the methodology through...

... . Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press . Psychology Fails to Trump the Multiyear, Structural Development Plan: Albert Hirschman’s Largely Frustrated Efforts to Place the “Ability to Make and Carry Out Development Decisions” at the Center of the Development Economics of the late...

... from simply being a passive “tool for decision making,” structured bureaucratic procedures, and formatted the basic concepts of policymaking. In contrast to stories of big theoretical breaks and shifts in economic ideas in the 1970s, the paper finally asks for the continuities of so-called applied...

.... The similarity he points to, however, is somewhat limited: while some of his articles from the 1930s stressed the subjectivity of producers' decisions, his later criticisms of standard policies, as well as the method he suggests for the design of policy, are based on the idea that costs are objective...

...Philippe Fontaine Abstract The concept of commitment has achieved a significant presence across US postwar social science, enjoying increased visibility from the mid-1950s. Economists insist that commitment is the result of a decision to bind oneself to a line of action; they use the concept...

...Antonella Rancan This article reconstructs Franco Modigliani’s and Herbert Simon’s close collaboration over the 1950s on implementation of a decision theory under uncertainty that partly contributed to the genesis of behavioral economics and rational expectations theory. Their collaboration reveals...

... that mental models—categories, concepts, narratives, and worldviews—profoundly influence our decision making by unconsciously shaping what we perceive and the “toolbox” of strategies we draw on to respond. Many researchers have connected this idea to economic development, yet they rarely identify their work...

...Gilbert L. Skillman A long-standing puzzle in the history of Marxian economic thought concerns Marx’s decision to omit the draft chapter titled “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” from the published version of volume 1 of Capital . A number of authors have explored this puzzle without...

... Terman. We show that engineers drew upon economic theories of decision and allocation to improve practical industrial management decisions. Reciprocally, economists found in engineering the tools that they needed to rethink production and growth theory (including linear programming, optimal control...

... Plan. Prices acted as administrative instructions, passing on costs to subscribers and shaping their present and future behavior according to the planned development of the system. This was a technocratic intervention: the engineer-economists made crucial and lasting decisions on land-use planning...

... those commonly labeled “neoclassical,” were uninterested, skeptical, and even dismissive of what they took to be an immature and faddish initiative. Gaps in postwar prestige and clashing models of social science contributed to the Ford Foundation's decision to fund economics on a separate track from...

.... Throughout that evolution, a constant, and a constraint, was the conception of monetary economics that Paul Samuelson had himself developed as early as 1937, a conception that informed the decision to bring in Franco Modigliani in 1962, as well as Duncan Foley and Miguel Sidrauski in 1965. Correspondence...

... and greater demand for responsive government, voluntary exchange theory emerged in the 1880s as a competitor to models that represented government as a monolithic decision maker. That voluntary exchange has faded out of the public finance literature belies the role it served launching the public goods debate...

... and sentiment.” According to a nineteenth-century tradition, belief is the base of human action; Edgeworth concludes therefore that probability is not useful for the theory of decision. We propose to classify Edgeworth's theory of probability as precursor of modern eclectic or pluralistic tradition...

... method, pointing out that Kalecki's theoretical conclusions were based on the tacit assumption that the decisions of consumption and investment are “independent from” the levy. Keynes's criticism is fully coherent with the method of analysis he adopted in the General Theory and with his critique...