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Marginal Analysis
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. Important marginal concepts Marginality For issues of marginality, constraints are conceptualized as a ''border'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes what's viewed as basic elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyzes the economy as a system where production, consumption, saving, and investment interact, and factors affecting it: employment of the resources of labour, capital, and land, currency inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on these elements. Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics, describing "what is", and normative economics, advocating "what ought to be"; between economic theory and applied economics; between rational a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Positivism
Positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning ''a posteriori'' facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, ''Sociology'', Seventh Canadian Edition, Pearson Canada Other ways of knowing, such as theology, metaphysics, intuition, or introspection, are rejected or considered meaningless. Although the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of western thought, modern positivism was first articulated in the early 19th century by Auguste Comte.. His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. After Comte, positivist schools arose in logic, psychology, economics, historiography, and other fields of thought. Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism has ... [...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 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 philosophy of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tautology (logic)
In mathematical logic, a tautology (from el, ταυτολογία) is a formula or assertion that is true in every possible interpretation. An example is "x=y or x≠y". Similarly, "either the ball is green, or the ball is not green" is always true, regardless of the colour of the ball. 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. It cannot be untrue. 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 contingent. Such a formula can be made either true or false based on the values assigned to its propositional variables. The dou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hermann Heinrich Gossen
Hermann Heinrich Gossen (7 September 1810 – 13 February 1858) was a Prussian economist who is often regarded as the first to elaborate a general theory of marginal utility. Life and work Gossen studied in Bonn, then worked in the Prussian administration until retiring in 1847, after which he sold insurance until his death. Prior to Gossen, a number of 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 application, and if Senior actually employed to the development of more general theory then he did so in language that caused the application to be missed by most readers. Gossen's book ''Die Entwickelung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln'' (''The Development of the Laws of Hu ... [...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 z=f(x, y, \ldots), 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 f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dependent And Independent Variables
Dependent and independent variables are variables in mathematical modeling, statistical modeling and experimental sciences. Dependent variables receive this name because, in an experiment, their values 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, in turn, are not seen as depending on any other variable in the scope of the experiment in question. In this sense, some common independent variables are time, space, density, mass, fluid flow rate, and previous values of some observed value of interest (e.g. human population size) to predict future values (the dependent variable). Of the two, it is always the dependent variable whose variation is being studied, by altering inputs, also known as regressors in a statistical context. In an experiment, any variable that can be attributed a value without attributing a value to any other variable is called an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ceteris Paribus
' (also spelled '; () 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, 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 in economics is " ... [...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 . 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. A degenerate case is a special case which is in some way qualitatively different from almost all of the cases allowed. 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. * Fermat's Last Theorem In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's conjecture, especially in older texts) states that no three positive integers , , and satisfy the equation for any integer value of greater than 2. The cases and have been ..., that has no solutions in positive integ ... [...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 Magne Mogstad ( University of Chicago). It is considered one of the top five journals in economics. Abstracting and indexing The journal is abstracted and indexed in EBSCO, ProQuest, EconLit , Research Papers in Economics, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences, and the Social Sciences Citation Index. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 9.103, ranking it 4/376 journals in the category "Economics". The journal is department-owned University of Chicago journal. Notable papers Among the most influential pa ... [...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 Elsie Elizabeth (Hungler) and Joseph Stigler. He was of German descent and spoke German in his childhood. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1931 with a BA 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. 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 there in 1938. He taught at Iowa State College from 1936 to 1938. He spent much of World War II at Columbia University, performin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zeitschrift Für Nationalökonomie
''Journal of Economics'', founded as ''Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie'', is an academic journal of economics with an emphasis on mathematical microeconomic theory, although it publishes occasional articles on macroeconomics. ''Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie'' was first published in 1930, as a revival of an earlier ''Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung'' which was published from 1892 into 1927 (from 1921 under the name ''Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft und Socialpolitik''). The initial editor of ''Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie'' was Hans Mayer, a third-generation member of the Austrian School. Mayer avowedly welcomed contributions from all schools of thought, so long as the work were scientifically rigorous and not politically ideological in nature.Hans Mayer: ''Zur Einführung''. In: ''Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie'', , Volume 1, No 1, pp. 1–3, . It is published by Springer Vienna, a division of Springer Science+Business Media S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
