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Consumer Welfare
Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomics, microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society. The principles of welfare economics are often used to inform public economics, which focuses on the ways in which government intervention can improve social welfare. Additionally, welfare economics serves as the theoretical foundation for several instruments of public economics, such as cost–benefit analysis. The intersection of welfare economics and behavioral economics has given rise to the subfield of behavioral welfare economics. Two fundamental theorems of welfare economics, fundamental theorems are associated with welfare economics. The first states that competitive markets, under certain assumptions, lead to Pareto efficiency, Pareto efficient outcomes. This idea is sometimes referred to as Adam Smith's invisible hand. The second theorem states that with further restrictions, any Pareto efficient outcome can be ach ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microeconomics
Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and Theory of the firm, firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarcity, scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the economy as a whole, which is studied in macroeconomics. One goal of microeconomics is to analyze the market mechanisms that establish relative prices among goods and services and allocate limited resources among alternative uses. Microeconomics shows conditions under which free markets lead to desirable allocations. It also analyzes market failure, where markets fail to produce Economic efficiency, efficient results. While microeconomics focuses on firms and individuals, macroeconomics focuses on the total of economic activity, dealing with the issues of Economic growth, growth, inflation, and unemployment—and with national policies relati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Status
Social status is the relative level of social value a person is considered to possess. Such social value includes respect, honour, honor, assumed competence, and deference. On one hand, social scientists view status as a "reward" for group members who treat others well and take initiative. This is one explanation for its apparent cross-cultural universality. On the other hand, while people with higher status experience a litany of benefits—such as greater health, admiration, resources, influence, and freedom—those with lower status experience poorer outcomes across all of those metrics. Importantly, status is based in widely shared ''beliefs'' about who members of a society judge as more competent or moral. While such beliefs can stem from an impressive performance or success, they can also arise from possessing characteristics a society has deemed meaningful like a person's race or occupation. In this way, status reflects how a society judges a person's relative social worth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tibor Scitovsky
Tibor de Scitovsky, also known as Tibor Scitovsky (November 3, 1910 – June 1, 2002), was a Hungarian-born, American economist best known for his writing on the nature of people's happiness in relation to consumption. He was an associate professor and professor of economics at Stanford University from 1946 through 1958 and an Eberle Professor of Economics from 1970 until his retirement in 1976, when he became professor emeritus. In honor of his deep contributions to economic analysis, he was elected Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Life Scitovsky was born in Hungary in 1910. As the ''de'' indicates, he was born into a noble family; his father, Tibor Scitovszky, held the post of Foreign Minister. He studied at the Pázmány Péter University (from which he held an undergraduate degree in law), the University of Cambridge, and the London School of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Hicks
Sir John Richard Hicks (8 April 1904 – 20 May 1989) was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book '' Value and Capital'' (1939) significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him. In 1972 he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (jointly) for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory. Early life Hicks was born in 1904 in Warwick, England, and was the son of Edward Hicks, editor and part proprietor of the Warwick and Leamington Spa Courier newspaper, and Dorothy Catherine, née Stephens, daughter of a non-conformist minister ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicholas Kaldor
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor (12 May 1908 – 30 September 1986), born Káldor Miklós, was a Hungarian-born British economist. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare spending, welfare comparisons (1939), derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. Biography Káldor Miklós was born in Budapest, son of Gyula Káldor, lawyer and legal adviser to the German legation in Budapest, and Jamba, an accomplished linguist and "a well-educated, cultured woman". He was educated in Budapest, as well as in Berlin, and at the London School of Economics, where he graduated with a first-class BSc (Econ.) degree in 1930. He subsequently became an assistant lecturer and, by 1938, lecturer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (; ; born Wilfried Fritz Pareto; 15 July 1848 – 19 August 1923) was an Italian polymath, whose areas of interest included sociology, civil engineering, economics, political science, and philosophy. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices, and was one of the minds behind the Lausanne School of economics. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term '' elite'' in social analysis and contributed to elite theory. He has been described as "one of the last Renaissance scholars. Trained in physics and mathematics, he became a polymath whose genius radiated into nearly all other major fields of knowledge." He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics. He was also the first to claim that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Paret ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham (; 4 February Dual dating, 1747/8 Old Style and New Style dates, O.S. [15 February 1748 Old Style and New Style dates, N.S.] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." He became a leading theorist in Anglo-Americans, Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated Individualism, individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He called for the abolitionism, abolition of slavery, capital punishment#Abolition of capital punishment, capital punishment, and physical punishment, includ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distributive Efficiency
In welfare economics, distributive efficiency occurs when goods and services are received by those who have the greatest need for them. Abba Lerner first proposed the idea of distributive efficiency in his 1944 book '' The Economics of Control''. The law of diminishing marginal utility The concept of distributive efficiency is based on the law of diminishing marginal utility. According to this economic law, as a person gets more to spend, things will be bought that give less and less utility. For example, if a person is given a gift certificate for a music download (and has no way to resell the certificate), the gift certificate will be used to purchase the song that will be enjoyed the most. If another certificate is given, the second favorite song will be bought. The process continues as long as the person keeps getting certificates for downloads. Each additional song the person buys is slightly less desirable than the one before. Diminishing utility and society Lerner applie ... [...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] |
Cardinal Utility
In economics, a cardinal utility expresses not only which of two outcomes is preferred, but also the intensity of preferences, i.e. ''how much'' better or worse one outcome is compared to another. In consumer choice theory, economists originally attempted to replace cardinal utility with the apparently weaker concept of ordinal utility. Cardinal utility appears to impose the assumption that levels of absolute satisfaction exist, so magnitudes of increments to satisfaction can be compared across different situations. However, economists in the 1940s proved that under mild conditions, ordinal utilities imply cardinal utilities. This result is now known as the von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem; many similar utility representation theorems exist in other contexts. History In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli was the first to theorize about the marginal value of money. He assumed that the value of an additional amount is inversely proportional to the pecuniary possessions which a per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Cecil Pigou
Arthur Cecil Pigou (; 18 November 1877 – 7 March 1959) was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, Index (economics), index numbers, and measurement of national output.Nahid Aslanbeigui, 2008. "Pigou, Arthur Cecil (1877–1959)," ''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics'', 2nd edAbstract./ref> His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly served on several public committees, including the Walter Cunliffe, 1st Baron Cunliffe, Cunliffe Committee and the 1919 Royal Commission on income tax. Early life and education Pigou was born at Ryde on the I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred Marshall
Alfred Marshall (26 July 1842 – 13 July 1924) was an English economist and one of the most influential economists of his time. His book ''Principles of Economics (Marshall), Principles of Economics'' (1890) was the dominant economic textbook in England for many years, and brought the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility, and costs of production into a coherent whole, popularizing the modern Neoclassical economics, neoclassical approach which dominates microeconomics to this day. As a result, he is known as the father of scientific economics. Life and career Marshall was born at Bermondsey in London, the second son of William Marshall (1812–1901), a clerk and cashier at the Bank of England, and Rebecca (1817–1878), daughter of butcher Thomas Oliver, from whom, on her mother's death, she inherited property. Marshall had two brothers and two sisters; a cousin was the economist Ralph George Hawtrey, Ralph Hawtrey. The Marshalls were a West Country clergy, clerical f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
