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Marginalists
Marginalism is a theory of economics that attempts to explain the discrepancy in the value of goods and services by reference to their secondary, or marginal, utility. It states that the reason why the price of diamonds is higher than that of water, for example, owes to the greater additional satisfaction of the diamonds over the water. Thus, while the water has greater total utility, the diamond has greater marginal utility. Although the central concept of marginalism is that of marginal utility, marginalists, following the lead of Alfred Marshall, drew upon the idea of marginal physical productivity in explanation of cost. The neoclassical tradition that emerged from British marginalism abandoned the concept of utility and gave marginal rates of substitution a more fundamental role in analysis. Marginalism is an integral part of mainstream economic theory. Main concepts Marginality For issues of marginality, constraints are conceptualized as a ''border'' or ''margin''. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marginal Utility
Marginal utility, in mainstream economics, describes the change in ''utility'' (pleasure or satisfaction resulting from the consumption) of one unit of a good or service. Marginal utility can be positive, negative, or zero. Negative marginal utility implies that every consumed additional unit of a commodity causes more harm than good, leading to a decrease in overall utility. In contrast, positive marginal utility indicates that every additional unit consumed increases overall utility. In the context of cardinal utility, liberal economists postulate a law of diminishing marginal utility. This law states that the first unit of consumption of a good or service yields more satisfaction or utility than the subsequent units, and there is a continuing reduction in satisfaction or utility for greater amounts. As consumption increases, the additional satisfaction or utility gained from each additional unit consumed falls, a concept known as ''diminishing marginal utility.'' This idea is us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neoclassical Economics
Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption, and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are observed as driven by the supply and demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production. This approach has often been justified by appealing to rational choice theory. Neoclassical economics is the dominant approach to microeconomics and, together with Keynesian economics, formed the neoclassical synthesis which dominated mainstream economics as "neo-Keynesian economics" from the 1950s onward. Classification The term was originally introduced by Thorstein Veblen in his 1900 article "Preconceptions of Economic Science", in which he related marginalists in the tradition of Alfred Marshall ''et al.'' to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economics
Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of Agent (economics), economic agents and how economy, economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economy, economies, including individual agents and market (economics), markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and Expenditure, investment expenditure interact; and the factors of production affecting them, such as: Labour (human activity), labour, Capital (economics), capital, Land (economics), land, and Entrepreneurship, enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that impact gloss ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Instrumentalism
In philosophy of science and in epistemology, instrumentalism is a methodological view that ideas are useful instruments, and that the worth of an idea is based on how effective it is in explaining and predicting natural phenomena. According to instrumentalists, a successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes. Scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict ''observations'' in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow ''explain'' these laws. Instrumentalism is a perspective originally introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906.Roberto Torretti, ''The Philosophy of Physics'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)pp. 242–43 "Like Whewell and Mach, Duhem was a practicing scientist who devoted an important part of his adult life to the history and philos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tautology (logic)
In mathematical logic, a tautology (from ) is a formula that is true regardless of the interpretation of its component terms, with only the logical constants having a fixed meaning. For example, a formula that states, "the ball is green or the ball is not green," is always true, regardless of what a ball is and regardless of its colour. Tautology is usually, though not always, used to refer to valid formulas of propositional logic. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein first applied the term to redundancies of propositional logic in 1921, borrowing from rhetoric, where a tautology is a repetitive statement. In logic, a formula is satisfiable if it is true under at least one interpretation, and thus a tautology is a formula whose negation is unsatisfiable. In other words, it cannot be false. Unsatisfiable statements, both through negation and affirmation, are known formally as contradictions. A formula that is neither a tautology nor a contradiction is said to be logically c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hermann Heinrich Gossen
Hermann Heinrich Gossen (7 September 1810 – 13 February 1858) was a German economist who is often regarded as the first to elaborate, in detail, a general theory of marginal utility. Prior to Gossen, a number of economic theorists, including Gabriel Cramer, Daniel Bernoulli, William Forster Lloyd, Nassau William Senior, and Jules Dupuit had employed or asserted the significance of some notion of marginal utility. But Cramer, Bernoulli, and Dupuit had focussed upon specific problems, Lloyd had not presented any applications of theory, and if Senior provided a detailed elaboration of the general theory he had developed, he had done so in language that caused his applications of theory to be missed by most readers. Life and family background Hermann Heinrich Gossen was born in Düren, Roer (department) (Roerdépartement, or Département de la Roer), First French Empire. Today that area is known as North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Hermann died in Cologne (Köln), North Rhine-W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Partial Derivative
In mathematics, a partial derivative of a function of several variables is its derivative with respect to one of those variables, with the others held constant (as opposed to the total derivative, in which all variables are allowed to vary). Partial derivatives are used in vector calculus and differential geometry. The partial derivative of a function f(x, y, \dots) with respect to the variable x is variously denoted by It can be thought of as the rate of change of the function in the x-direction. Sometimes, for the partial derivative of z with respect to x is denoted as \tfrac. Since a partial derivative generally has the same arguments as the original function, its functional dependence is sometimes explicitly signified by the notation, such as in: f'_x(x, y, \ldots), \frac (x, y, \ldots). The symbol used to denote partial derivatives is ∂. One of the first known uses of this symbol in mathematics is by Marquis de Condorcet from 1770, who used it for partial differ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dependent And Independent Variables
A variable is considered dependent if it depends on (or is hypothesized to depend on) an independent variable. Dependent variables are studied under the supposition or demand that they depend, by some law or rule (e.g., by a mathematical function), on the values of other variables. Independent variables, on the other hand, are not seen as depending on any other variable in the scope of the experiment in question. Rather, they are controlled by the experimenter. In pure mathematics In mathematics, a function (mathematics), function is a rule for taking an input (in the simplest case, a number or set of numbers)Carlson, Robert. A concrete introduction to real analysis. CRC Press, 2006. p.183 and providing an output (which may also be a number). A symbol that stands for an arbitrary input is called an independent variable, while a symbol that stands for an arbitrary output is called a dependent variable. The most common symbol for the input is , and the most common symbol for the o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ceteris Paribus
' (also spelled ') (Classical ) is a Latin phrase, meaning "other things equal"; some other English translations of the phrase are "all other things being equal", "other things held constant", "all else unchanged", and "all else being equal". A statement about a causal, empirical, moral, or logical relation between two states of affairs is ''ceteris paribus'' if it is acknowledged that the statement, although usually accurate in expected conditions, can fail because of, or the relation can be abolished by, intervening factors. chapter 2 A ''ceteris paribus'' assumption is often key to scientific inquiry, because scientists seek to eliminate factors that perturb a relation of interest. Thus epidemiologists, for example, may seek to control independent variables as factors that may influence dependent variables—the outcomes of interest. Likewise, in scientific modeling, simplifying assumptions permit illustration of concepts considered relevant to the inquiry. An example ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Special Case
In logic, especially as applied in mathematics, concept is a special case or specialization of concept precisely if every instance of is also an instance of but not vice versa, or equivalently, if is a generalization of .Brown, James Robert. Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction to a World of Proofs and Pictures'. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2005. 27. A limiting case is a type of special case which is arrived at by taking some aspect of the concept to the extreme of what is permitted in the general case. If is true, one can immediately deduce that is true as well, and if is false, can also be immediately deduced to be false. A degenerate case is a special case which is in some way qualitatively different from almost all of the cases allowed. Examples Special case examples include the following: * All squares are rectangles (but not all rectangles are squares); therefore the square is a special case of the rectangle. It is also a special case of the rhombus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Journal Of Political Economy
The ''Journal of Political Economy'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the University of Chicago Press. Established by James Laurence Laughlin in 1892, it covers both theoretical and empirical economics. In the past, the journal published quarterly from its introduction through 1905, ten issues per volume from 1906 through 1921, and bimonthly from 1922 through 2019. The editor-in-chief is Esteban Rossi-Hansberg (University of Chicago). It is considered one of the top five journals in economics. JPE Micro and JPE Macro In 2023, University of Chicago Press announced the establishment of Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics (JPE Micro) and Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics (JPE Macro), two new journals that are vertically integrated with the Journal of Political Economy. Abstracting and indexing The journal is abstracted and indexed in EBSCO, ProQuest, EconLit, Research Papers in Economics, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Scien ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Stigler
George Joseph Stigler (; January 17, 1911 – December 1, 1991) was an American economist. He was the 1982 laureate in Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and is considered a key leader of the Chicago school of economics. Early life and education Stigler was born in Seattle, Washington, the son of Hungarian Elsie Elizabeth (Erzsébet Hungler, born in Bakonypéterd, Veszprém county, Kingdom of Hungary) and Bavarian Joseph Stigler. He was of German and Hungarian descent and spoke German in his childhood. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1931 with a B.A. and then spent a year at Northwestern University, from which he obtained his MBA in 1932. It was during his studies at Northwestern that Stigler developed an interest in economics and decided on an academic career. After he received a tuition scholarship from the University of Chicago, Stigler enrolled there in 1933 to study economics and went on to earn his PhD in economics in 1938. Career Stigler t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
