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The theory of consumer choice fills the opening chapters of any micro-economic textbook. Yet, surprisingly, this position of privilege has not translated into a flourishing of economic research that is comparable to what has happened in other branches of economic reasoning. Starting with Menger, the Austrian economic tradition has always shifted the focus of attention from the problem of equilibrium to that of social order, to the evolution of norms, institutions and practices that favor social cooperation and coordination. Within this tradition competition and markets are not viewed as states, but as processes in which change and errors occur and efficiency is reached but also easily lost. The real economic problem becomes a problem of knowledge how it is discovered, how it is transmitted. Consumers interactions and choices and actual consumption practices play an important role in these evolving forms of sociality. And it is within this framework, that allows for experimentation and learning, that they should be studied. This title is part of the Advances in Austrian Economics series. It contains a collection of high-level papers on the evolution of consumption

This research article analyze with a qualitative methodology of Aurora Luque's latest collection of poems, Personal & político (2015). The veiled reference in the title to the feminist motto «the personal is political» implies that the work will focus on how the individual is inevitably connected to the social and urban dimensions of power relationships. In the book, intertextuality conveys the concerns of a lyrical subject who lives in the weak postmodern society populated by corpses that have lost the contact with nature, their yearning for life, their desire for freedom and love, their ability to discern between the useful and the trivial or to choose between what deserves to be admired and consumerist fetishes. Faced with this dichotomy, the written word and the rebellion of some female characters are entrusted with the task of sowing the seed of change. ; En el presente artículo de investigación se analiza, mediante una metodología cualitativa, el último poemario de Aurora Luque, Personal & político (2015). En particular, la referencia implícita en el título al lema feminista «lo personal es político» sugiere que la obra hace hincapié en cómo la dimensión individual se inserta inevitablemente en la social y urbana de las relaciones de poder. En el libro, la intertextualidad vehicula las inquietudes de un sujeto lírico que se mueve en la mortecina sociedad postmoderna poblada de cadáveres que han perdido el contacto con la naturaleza, el anhelo de vida, el deseo de libertad y de amor, la capacidad de discernir entre lo útil y lo trivial o de escoger entre lo que merece ser admirado y los fetiches consumistas. Frente a ello, se encomienda a la palabra escrita y a la rebeldía de unos personajes femeninos la tarea de sembrar la semilla del cambio.

Tibor Scitovsky made fundamental contributions across many fields of economics, from international trade and growth to monopoly power and competition. But his main interest, and principal legacy, has been in exploring new areas in welfare economics by drawing on research in psychology and other social science disciplines. In The Joyless Economy (1976), Scitovsky analyzed the formation of preferences and how these processes may respond, on the one hand, to activities that simply ease and free life from pain and bother and what he called comfort or defensive activities and, on the other, to "stimulating" activities in all their variety, from sports and the arts to intellectual activities. These, that he deemed creative, are also the pursuits that characterize a joyful economy. He owed this distinction to the discovery of a new body of experimental research in psychophysiology. In my article I retrace the basic contributions of this new psychology of motivations and show how Scitovsky used them to formulate a new model of individual choice.

This article analyzes an early and relatively little known debate on the role of social interdependencies in consumption and their implications for economic theory. The debate began in the pages of the Economic Journal when, in 1892, Alfred Marshall's student Henry Cunynghame addressed the consequences that an increase in the supply of goods might have for individual utility when this includes external effects such as a desire for display and distinction. Such interdependencies in consumption were also taken very seriously by A. C. Pigou who, in successive articles in the same journal (1903, 1910, 1913), explored in great detail the impact of third-party consumption on an individual's utility function and, potentially, on social welfare. In fact, in such cases, the derivation of the market demand curve, and even the very notion of consumer surplus, seemed to become problematic. Both Marshall and F. Y. Edgeworth remained skeptical toward the theoretical treatment of externalities in consumption, offering reasons of both practical and analytical relevance. In the same period in the Economic Journal, Caroline Foley (1893) analyzed the phenomenon of social interrelations among consumers in a more evolutionary perspective, emphasizing in addition more general possibilities in interdependencies, including change and innovation. What is of interest in this debate is that it was the first attempt in the history of economic analysis to examine the analytical consequences that considerations of social interdependencies in consumption may have for economic theory. These related to the drawing of the market demand curve, the measurement of consumer surplus, and the more general issue of how to deal with time and change in economic models. These considerations, however, proved difficult to be addressed with the then available economic tools and this, in turn, led to their being simply shelved. We conclude by noting that the participants in this debate cast the problem of social interrelations in consumption almost exclusively in terms of positional rivalry and emulation. This overshadowed the creative dimension and positive externalities that can arise through such interrelations. Foley's more historical perspective has the merit of highlighting precisely this dimension.