The meaning of competition: a guided reading (part III)
This is the final part in a guided reading of Friedrich Hayek’s classic paper, The Meaning of Competition.
Economics
The Exchange reacts to itself
The factors that determine activity on the Exchange are innumerable, with events, current or expected, often bearing no apparent relation to price variation. Beside the […]
The meaning of competition: a guided reading (part II)
This is part two in a three part guided reading of Friedrich Hayek’s classic paper, The Meaning of Competition.
The meaning of competition: a guided reading (part I)
This is part one in a three part guided reading of Friedrich Hayek’s classic paper, The Meaning of Competition. Let’s jump right into it…
Americans in love with analysis
You Americans are mad. You analyze and analyze where we have one-man who makes a decision, and the difference is 5 percent in the resulting answers.
An auction trilemma?
These results imply an auction trilemma. Static, strategy-proof, or credible: An optimal auction can have any two of these properties, but not all three at […]
How does equality of dignity stimulate innovation?
What I mean by bourgeois equality is equality before the law, that’s essential, but it’s not sufficient, because exactly as you say, you need equality […]
Are defense firms really public firms?
In 1969 John Kenneth Galbraith penned a piece for the New York Times titled The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized arguing, among other things, that it was folly for defense contractors to claim that they were private corporations.
Kling Answers a Question on Defense Economics
Here’s my question to Arnold Kling: I was wondering if you could comment on the fact that you’ll never see papers or courses in defense […]
Bill Janeway has an interesting story on technological revolutions
At the frontier, advanced progress is made by trial-and-error and error and error and error. Efficiency in the allocation of resources means doing this calculus of net-present value, expected future cash flows, cost versus benefits. But, at the frontier, you can’t define the benefits.
Do intangibles lead to a productivity divergence?
When intangibles hardly matter, then capital and labor ought to be about equally productive across all firms. When intangibles matter a lot, then productivity differences will widen. What does this mean for defense organization?
Cesar Hidalgo on tacit knowledge and social networks
Coase, in the 1930s goes to a presentation from a professor in the department of commerce in LSE (London School of Economics) and this professor […]
B-52 Development and Defense Lessons from Armen Alchian
Mandeles argues convincingly that recognizing the inevitability of error may be the single most important factor in the design of effective organizations and procedures to […]
Technical prestige as an end in itself for successful firms
This commercial competition [of aviation fuels] was a result of the profit motive, but was far from profitable, as is often the case in aviation, […]
Phrases that describe defense acquisition
This ‘realistic’ view which has now dominated politics for so long has hardly produced the results which its advocates desired. Instead of having achieved greater […]