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[eng] This thesis is composed of 3 independent essays on economic theory. Each essay is meant to be read separately, including footnotes and appendices. In particular, essays 2 and 3 include specific bibliography. The general bibliography is included at the end of the thesis. The first essay reviews some well known conceptual and empirical problems that appear when economic theorists deal with preferences and choice theory, in general. While assessing those problems, the essay lays the ground for a detailed discussion of the possibility of preference learning, formation and change. The essay concludes proposing a theoretical framework to study these phenomena. The second essay, although independent from the first, is also devoted to the issue of preference change. In particular, it studies the possibility that cultural preferences evolve as a result of the combination of technological innovation and cultural transmission mechanisms. At the same time, it allows for the possibility that those cultural preferences determine the short term outcome of economic variables. In addition, it builds a framework where the combination of technological innovation, cultural transmission and economic structure lead to a process of endogenous preference heterogeneity and clustering. Hence it provides a model to understand how culture and the economic structure interact and coevolve. The third essay presents some theoretical problems that arise when using the concept of a matching function as a modelling device for the labor market. In particular, necessary conditions for the ratio of the number of matches per job searcher to be interpreted as the average job finding probability are established. References [Abel, 1990] Abel, A. B. (1990). Asset prices under habit formation and catching up with the joneses. The American Economic Review, pages 38-42. [Afriat, 1967] Afriat, S. (1967). The construction of utility functions from expenditure data. International Economic Review, 8(1):67-77. [Al-Najjar, 1993] Al-Najjar, N. (1993). Non-transitive smooth preferences. Journal of Economic Theory, 60(1):14 -41. [[Aragones et al., 2005] Aragones, E., Gilboa, I., Postlewaite, A., and Schmeidler, D. (2005). Fact-free learning. The American Economic Review, 95(5):1355-1368. [Ariely et al., 2003] Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., and Prelec, D. (2003). coherent arbitrariness: Stable demand curves without stable preferences. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1):73-106. [Arrow, 1986] Arrow, K. (1986). Rationality of self and others in an economic system. Journal of Business, pages 385-399. [Arrow and Hahn, 1971] Arrow, K. and Hahn, F. (1971). General competitive analysis. Holden-Day San Francisco.165 [Arrow, 1959] Arrow, K. J. (1959). Rational choice functions and orderings. Economica, 26(102):121-127. [Aumann, 1962] Aumann, R. (1962). Utility theory without the completeness axiom. Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, pages 445-462. [Balasko, 2003] Balasko, Y. (2003). Economies with price-dependent preferences. Journal of economic theory, 109(2):333-359. [Balzer, 1982] Balzer, W. (1982). Empirical claims in exchange economics. In Philosophy of Economics, pages 16-40. Springer. [Becker, 1962] Becker, G. (1962). Irrational behavior and economic theory. The Journal of Political Economy, pages 1-13. [Becker, 1978] Becker, G. S. (1978). The economic approach to human behavior. University of Chicago Press. [Berry and Pakes, 2007a] Berry, S. and Pakes, A. (2007a). The pure characteristics demand model. International Economic Review, 48(4):1193-1225. [Berry and Pakes, 2007b] Berry, S. and Pakes, A. (2007b). The pure characteristics demand model*. International Economic Review, 48(4):1193-1225. [Bewley, 1986] Bewley, T. (1986). Knightian uncertainty theory: part i. Yale University. [Blaug, 1992] Blaug, M. (1992). The methodology of economics: Or, how economists explain. Cambridge University Press. [Boudon, 1998] Boudon, R. (1998). Social mechanisms without black boxes. Social mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory, 172. [Brown and Matzkin, 1996] Brown, D. and Matzkin, R. (1996). Testable restrictions on the equilibrium manifold. Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, pages 1249-1262. [Bunge, 1993] Bunge, M. (1993). Realism and antirealism in social science. Theory and Decision, 35(3):207-235. [Caldwell, 1984] Caldwell, B. J. (1984). Some problems with falsificationism in economics. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 14(4):489-495. [Chapman and Johnson, 1999] Chapman, G. B. and Johnson, E. J. (1999). Anchoring, activation, and the construction of values. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 79(2):115 -153. [Deaton and Muellbauer, 1980] Deaton, A. and Muellbauer, J. (1980). An almost ideal demand system. The American economic review, pages 312-326.

This thesis is a collection of six papers in auction theory, with several economic applications, both to real life auctions and to other economic phenomena. In the introduction to the thesis, Onderstal argues why auction theory is an important branch of economic theory, and discusses several interesting results that emerge from auction theory. The first paper is about situations in which the outcome of an auction determines the market structure of a consumer market. The Dutch petrol market is used as an illustration for this model. The second and the third papers, both motivated by the UMTS auctions that took place in Europe, consider auctions in which losing bidders obtain financial externalities from the winner. The fourth paper deals with the exposure problem in auctions, and is applied to the Dutch DCS-1800 auction. The fifth paper interprests political lobbying as an "all-pay auction" and considers situations in which the government maximizes social welfare by completely banning lobbying. Finally, the sixth paper constructs mechanisms that are optimal from the bidders' point of view, with applications to lobbying, advertising, political campaigns, and auctions.

This contribution is a review of the research handbook in comparative constitutional law, titled Comparative Constitutional Theory edited by Gary Jacobsohn and Miguel Schor. It was published in 2018 by Edward Elgar Publishing. Every law library worthy of the name should acquire it for the benefit of constitutional scholars and advanced students of constitutional comparison.

Desire is bound up with structural inequalities and normative violence. Even when it seeks to resist them, it keeps risking to reproduce hierarchies. While taking seriously the power analysis of desire, Engel, Govrin, and Holzhey have organized the lecture series 'Desire's Multiplicity and Serendipity' in order to explore the potentials and limits of desire as a transformative force. They propose to draw on theories asserting desire's multiplicity and to face desire's paradoxes by calling on serendipity, allowing for fortunate errans. Starting the conversation with their different understandings of serendipity and the politics of desire in psychic, social, and structural registers, they wish to engage in a discussion with the public: What are the potentials of happenstance and erring when trying to leave the dis/comfort zone of identity and normative forms of intimacy and sexuality? How can one find openings for queer reconceptualizations of desire? Antke Engel is an independent scholar working in the fields of queer, feminist and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy, and cultural politics. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Potsdam University in 2001, and since 2006 she is director of the Institute for Queer Theory (Berlin) Jule Jakob Govrin is a Ph.D candidate in philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a research assistant of the Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin. In her Ph.D. project she is focusing on the epistemological entanglements of desire and economy. Her research interests include political and social philosophy, theories of desire, sexuality studies, poststructuralist philosophies. Christoph Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (1993) and another one in German literature with a dissertation on the critical potential of paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (2001). ; desire Conserves desire Transgresses desire: On the Paradoxical Politics of Desire , roundtable, ICI Berlin, 4 February 2015 ...

The conversation between Jafari S. Allen und Serena O. Dankwa explored different Black postcolonial sites in which desires for (erotic) power, friendship, and intimacy are being negotiated. Both Dankwa's research into the everyday materiality and provisionality of female same-sex intimacy in Ghana and Allen's work on transnational Black desires for political empowerment and autonomy transcend analytical boundaries between friendship and sexuality, between scholarship, art, and activism. While considering intimate connections and disconnections across the 'Black world', this conversation sought to understand the intertwinement of various forms of struggle and sociality.Jafari S. Allen is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology. He works at the intersections of (queer) sexuality, gender, and blackness, and teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality, and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory. Allen is the author of ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke UP, 2011) and editor of Black/Queer/Diaspora – a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (18:2-3, 2012). Serena O. Dankwa earned her PhD from the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Berne. Specialized in the study of gender and sexuality in West Africa, her doctoral project focused on practices of female friendship and same-sex intimacy in postcolonial Ghana. In 2010-2011, she was the Sarah Pettit Fellow in LGBT Studies at Yale University. Besides her academic work, she freelances as a music journalist and broadcaster with SRF2 Kultur. ; Desire, Friendship, and Intimacy Across the 'Black World' , lectures, ICI Berlin, 28 May 2015

Discussion of the roundtable desire Conserves desire Transgresses desire: On the Paradoxical Politics of Desire , ICI Berlin, 4 February 2015, video recording, mp4, 01:08:44

Game theory and contemporary decision theory provide the mathematical foundation of economics. Neuroeconomics, which principally concerns itself with the integrative study of brain, mind and behavior, builds on this mathematical foundation while also drawing heavily from the repository of experimental paradigms that have grown out of economic game theory and behavioral economics. Game theory is central to neuroeconomics primarily because it constitutes a formal mathematical framework with which to bridge insights occurring at different levels of neuroeconomic analysis. In particular, game theoretic principles can be used to express neuroscientific ideas about the brain, psychological concepts regarding the human mind, and economic predictions of human behavior, thereby making these different ideas more rigorously relatable to each other. In this chapter we provide a nontechnical introduction to game theory and its relation to neuroeconomics. It has been written as an overview of the basic concepts most likely to be encountered in neuroeconomic research. The first part of the chapter introduces the reader to the basic concepts and philosophical underpinnings of game theory in relation to neuroeconomics. The second part is an introduction and discussion of common games, including the games featured in the other chapters of this book.

At head of title: The Dimensionality of Nations, Project, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

International audience ; In his celebrated 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, the Parisian intellectual and theorist Didier Eribon travels home for the first time in thirty years following the death of his father. There he tries to account for the change in politics of his working class family over the period he has been away: from supporting the Communist Party to voting for the National Front. But Eribon also discusses the transition he himself has undergone as a result of having escaped his working class culture and environment through education, and how this has left him unsure whom it is he is actually writing for. He may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up poor and gay, however he is aware few working class people are ever likely to read his book.At the same time, Eribon emphasizes that his non-conforming identity has left him with a sense of just how important it is to display a 'lack of respect for the rules' of bourgeois liberal humanist 'decorum that reign in university circles', and that insist 'people follow established norms regarding "intellectual debate" when what is at stake clearly has to do with political struggle'. Together with his friend Édouard Louis and partner Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Eribon wants to 'rethink' the antihumanist theoretical tradition of Foucault, Derrida, Cixous et al. to produce a theory 'in which something is at stake': a theory that speaks about 'class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality', and yet has the potential to generate the same kind of power and excitement as 'a Kendrick Lamar concert'.With 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory', I likewise want to reinvent what it means to theorise by showing a certain lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum the university hardly ever questions. I want do so, however, by also breaking with those bourgeois liberal humanist conventions of intellectual debate that – for all his emphasis on rebelling 'in and through' the technologies of knowledge production – continue to govern the ...

The objectives of this article strive to describe the idea and rationale of combining i.e. why, when and how to develop theoretically new combined approaches. Then business administration, especially marketing is used as a theoretical and empirical illustrative area. Methodology is inductive and deductive logic and in the empirical examples surveys, case analysis and utilization of secondary data. This article introduce a new promising way, in the long run, to develop new comprehensive approaches and even paradigms for different disciplines, subdisciplines and branches of subdiciplines. Therefore, the ultimate message of the article is to challenge the researchers to put the idea and rationale for combing to the test in their own research field and to build new combined and comprehensive approaches if possible in the field. This message is rather multidisciplinary concerning for example economics, social sciences and political sciences in addition to business administration.

My dissertation is composed of three chapters. In the first, I study the incentive role of information – how the strategic release of information can induce an agent to exert more effort on a project. More specifically, I focus on how feedback can be provided to a worker who is uninformed about the progress they make on a long term project. I show that delaying feedback about their performance can induce the worker to continue working on the project longer than they would were they to learn about their performance without delay. Negative feedback, due to the absence of good news, received in the early stages of the project can cause them to quit prematurely. In the second chapter, I study a model of matching between individuals and institutions. Matching models allow researchers to identify optimal allocations of individuals to school seats, medical residency programs and other positions over which individuals have preferences and for which they may differ in suitability. While we know that in models in which individuals only care about the institution they match with, stable matchings always exist, I show that when individuals also care about the the number of matches made by the institution they join, stable matchings no longer exist in general. I show that stable matchings can only be found under a set of conditions I identify. Relaxing any of these conditions leads to examples of markets with no stable matchings. In the third chapter, I set out to understand why elected politicians choose to toe the party line instead of voting on issues according to their own preferences. I find that despite the short term benefits of voting for their preferred policies, there are long-term benefits from coordinating their voting behavior among like-minded legislators. These findings provide a rationale for why political parties form among politicians with similar policy positions.

Recent political developments in many parts of the world seem likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the planetary-scale challenges of social polarization, inequality and environmental change societies face. In this unconventional multi-authored essay, we therefore seek to explore some of the ways in which planning theory might respond to the deeply unsettling times we live in. Taking the multiple, suggestive possibilities of the theme of unsettlement as a starting point, we aim to create space for reflection and debate about the state of the discipline and practice of planning theory, questioning what it means to produce knowledge capable of acting on the world today. Drawing on exchanges at a workshop attended by a group of emerging scholars in Portland, Oregon in late 2016, the essay begins with an introduction section exploring the contemporary resonances of 'unsettling' in, of and for planning theory. This is followed by four, individually authored responses which each connect the idea of unsettlement to key challenges and possible future directions. We end by calling for a reflective practice of theorizing that accepts unsettlement but seeks to act knowingly and compassionately on the uneven terrain that it creates. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This article traces three phases urban theory: descriptive urban theory, Marxist urban theory, and postcolonial urban theory. It argues that these three types of urban writings do not only differ thematically from, but also critique directly the phase of theory that precedes them. While the descriptive theory of the Chicago School is interested in studying then-new features of urban life, the political-economy paradigm of the Marxist urban theorists argues for a structural analysis of urbanism, pointing to the role of capital accumulation vis-a-vis the production of urban space. Most recently, postcolonial urban theory argues against the political- economy paradigm and its structuralist tendency to theorize world cities in terms of economic-financial relations at the expense of other aspects of urbanism. The article concludes by reviewing the usefulness and limits of writing urban theory around a theme. ; http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120397/1/Rugkhapan_NarrativesInUrbanTheory.pdf

The article presents the theoretical basis for privatisation. The vast jumble of goods and services can be sortedand classified according to two characteristics: exclusion and consumption. Goods and services are subject toexclusion if the potential user of the goods can be denied the goods or excluded from using them unless he meets theconditions set by the potential suppliers. The other relevant characteristic of goods and services has to do withconsumption. Some goods may be used or consumed jointly and simultaneously by many customers without being diminished in quality or quantity, while other goods are available only for individual (rather then joint) consumption;that is, if they are used by one consumer, they are not available for consumption by other. Goods can beclassified according to the degree to which they possess these two properties. The result is four idealised kinds ofgoods: individual goods (characterised by exclusion and individual consumption), toll goods (exclusion and jointconsumption), common-pool goods (nonexclusion and individual consumption), and collective goods(nonexclusion and joint consumption).The resulting classification determines the roles of government and of the nongovernmental (private) institutionsof society in supplying the goods and services. It examines the basic goods and services that people want andneed and discusses the intrinsic characteristics that permit them to be categorised usefully as private, toll, common-pool, or collective goods. It clarifies the role of collective action in supplying each of these kinds of goods.

This article deals with theories in practice. A policy theory is defined as the total of causal and other assumptions underlying a policy. It can be reconstructed and represented in several ways, for instance by means of causal hypotheses, graphs, goal trees, and decision trees. A combination of these different ways of reconstruction is possible. The quality of a policy theory can be evaluated on the basis of several criteria, for example, the precision of formulation, the differentiation, the integration, the empirical value, and the legitimacy of the policy theory. In order to get more insight in the determinants of policy theories, it is important to compare them in longitudinal and cross-sectional research. The structure and quality of policy theories have effects on the contents, the process, and the results of a policy. It is a plausible hypothesis that the goal attainment of a policy will be higher as the precision, the differentiation, the integration, the empirical value, and the legitimacy of a policy theory are higher.