Collective Action and Exchange: A Game Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy

摘要

With some-perhaps only slight-oversimplification, there are just two cornerstone results in economics: the first welfare theorem and the dominance solution of a prisoner's dilemma. The first tells us that egoistic behavior can produce efficient outcomes under perfect market institutions; the second tells us that some level of collective action is required to produce efficient outcomes. Almost every aspect of economic life is a collective action problem, so much so that the normative scope of economics might be described as how to transform inefficient prisoner's dilemmas into efficient markets. Perhaps surprisingly, economics as a taught discipline focuses mostly on one aspect of this story-more perfect markets are efficient. William D. Ferguson's book is an attempt to balance our students' perspective.