Kenneth J. Arrow

This is a collection of theoretical papers, including contributions by Partha Dasgupta and three Nobel prize-winning economists: Kenneth Arrow, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz. Originally published in 1982.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in journals. This publication of his collected papers, to be completed in seven topical volumes, will be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and taste in the selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer.This volume is concerned with the foundations of neo-classical economic analysis. General equilibrium is a theory of prices in which all of the actions of the economic agents in an economy are determined simultaneously and in a decentralized fashion. The price system, determined in competitive markets, guides actions for both firms and individual consumers. All of the complex interrelations of the economy are distilled into the determination of this price system.In these papers, Arrow examines the conditions under which such a price system would exist. He also clarifies the conditions under which the system can or cannot achieve an optimum. In the latter case, when “market failures” are present, he shows the role of a benevolent government in helping to overcome the induced inefficiencies.

Part intellectual autobiography and part exposition of complex yet contemporary economic ideas, this lively conversation with renowned scholar and public intellectual Kenneth J. Arrow focuses on economics and politics in light of history, current events, and philosophy as well. Reminding readers that economics is about redistribution and thus about how we treat each other, Arrow shows that the intersection of economics and ethics is of concern not just to economists but for the public more broadly. With a foreword by Amartya Sen, this book highlights the belief that government can be a powerful force for good, and is particularly relevant in the current political climate and to the lay reader as well as the economist.

Part intellectual autobiography and part exposition of complex yet contemporary economic ideas, this lively conversation with renowned scholar and public intellectual Kenneth J. Arrow focuses on economics and politics in light of history, current events, and philosophy as well. Reminding readers that economics is about redistribution and thus about how we treat each other, Arrow shows that the intersection of economics and ethics is of concern not just to economists but for the public more broadly. With a foreword by Amartya Sen, this book highlights the belief that government can be a powerful force for good, and is particularly relevant in the current political climate and to the lay reader as well as the economist.

Originally published in 1951, Social Choice and Individual Values introduced “Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem” and founded the field of social choice theory in economics and political science. This new edition, including a new foreword by Nobel laureate Eric Maskin, reintroduces Arrow’s seminal book to a new generation of students and researchers."Far beyond a classic, this small book unleashed the ongoing explosion of interest in social choice and voting theory. A half-century later, the book remains full of profound insight: its central message, ‘Arrow’s Theorem,’ has changed the way we think.”—Donald G. Saari, author of Decisions and Elections: Explaining the Unexpected

This book, co-authored by the Nobel-prized economist, Kenneth Arrow, considers public expenditures in the context of modern growth theory. It analyzes optimal growth with public capital. A theory of 'controllability' is developed and injected into public economics and growth models. Originally published in 1970

This volume contains a selection of Professor Uzawa's important contributions to mathematical economics. Subjects covered by these nineteen essays include consumption, production, equilibrium, capital, growth, planning, international trade, and the theory of social overhead capital. Written in the 1960s and early 1970s, the papers form a basis upon which economic theory has developed over the last twenty years. The collection includes some of Uzawa's classic contributions, such as 'Preference and Rational Choice in the Theory of Consumption' (presented at the First Stanford Symposium), 'Time Preference, the Consumption Function, and Optimum Asset Holdings', 'Neutral Inventions and the Stability of Growth Equilibrium', 'On a Two-Sector Model of Economic Growth', 'Time Preference and the Penrose Effect in a Two-Class Model of Economic Growth', and 'On the Economics of Social Overhead Capital'. The collection will be useful not only in understanding the nature of the development in economic theory today, but also in reflecting upon the direction toward which economic theory will be advancing in the future.

Nonprofit organizations are increasingly resembling private firms in a transformation bringing with it a shift in financial dependence from charitable donation to commercial sales activity. This book examines the reasons and consequences of the mimicry of private firms by fundraising nonprofits. User fees and revenue from ‘ancillary’ activities are mushrooming, with each having important side effects: pricing out of the market certain target groups; or distracting the nonprofit from its central mission. The authors focus first on issues that apply to nonprofits generally: the role of competition, analysis of nonprofit organization behavior, the effects of distribution goals and differential taxation of nonprofit and for-profit activity revenue, the effects of changes in donations on commercial activity, and conversions of nonprofits to for-profits. They then turn to specific industries: hospitals, universities, social service providers, zoos, museums, and public broadcasting. The book concludes with recommendations for research and for public policy toward nonprofits.

Nonprofit organizations are increasingly resembling private firms in a transformation bringing with it a shift in financial dependence from charitable donation to commercial sales activity. This book examines the reasons and consequences of the mimicry of private firms by fundraising nonprofits. User fees and revenue from ‘ancillary’ activities are mushrooming, with each having important side effects: pricing out of the market certain target groups; or distracting the nonprofit from its central mission. The authors focus first on issues that apply to nonprofits generally: the role of competition, analysis of nonprofit organization behavior, the effects of distribution goals and differential taxation of nonprofit and for-profit activity revenue, the effects of changes in donations on commercial activity, and conversions of nonprofits to for-profits. They then turn to specific industries: hospitals, universities, social service providers, zoos, museums, and public broadcasting. The book concludes with recommendations for research and for public policy toward nonprofits.

This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how can the criteria be ranked in priority order, and how should the alternatives be ranked from best to worst consistent with the ordering of criteria that may be conflicting or incommensurable?There have been many proposed solutions to the problem. Numerous empirical recipes-among them the majority method-have been submitted, based in large part on the subjective judgments and biases of various observers. The authors argue that the axiomatic formulation offers the surest path to a solution that is as objective as possible, minimally distorted by the unwitting imposition of personal values. They then develop a system of consistent and appealing axioms, confront the paradoxes that put axiomatic systems in general at risk, and demonstrate the applicability of their system to realistic industrial outranking problems.Even within the axiomatic framework, however, some leeway remains for subjective choice and conscious value decisions. One ad hoc criterion of choice the authors selected was that their method should be neither so flexible and open that personal biases might easily slip in, nor so artificially rigid that the play of intuition and creativity was systematically excluded. The book also takes a hard look at the theoretical and practical defects of the majority method, the favored proposed solution, and at such associated issues as committee decision techniques, strategic majority voting; and restriction conditions.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.The study of production is central to economic theory, and capital and its accumulation are two of the most interesting aspects of the modern production process. Capital may take the form of inventories of inputs, inventories of outputs, or machines and other fixed goods. The essential and unique aspect of all types of capital is that it must be accumulated as the result of prior stages of the production process. This gives the dynamic theory of production a recursive structure that can be exploited by economic analysis. The optimization of production under recursive conditions lends itself to general mathematical methods of dynamic programming and optimal control theory. This is the main theme of the essays included in this fifth volume of Kenneth Arrow's Collected Papers.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.Although economic theory has been Kenneth Arrow's comparative advantage as well as his special interest, from time to time he has turned his attention to applied problems, often with unexpected results. A request from the Ford Foundation to write a survey of health economics led to his famous paper, "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care," which raised for the first time many issues in the economics of information, particularly what are now called incentive compatibility issues. Other fruitful papers included in this volume deal with racial discrimination, the cost of oil imports, health insurance, environmental resources, and urban economics. Arrow's main interest in studying these disparate problems has been their potential source for new theory as well as their policy applications.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.The third volume of Kenneth Arrow's Collected Papers concerns the basic concept of rationality as it applies to an economic decision maker. In particular, it addresses the problem of choice faced by consumers in a multicommodity world and presents specific models of choice useful in economic analysis. It also discusses choice models under uncertainty, giving the basic theory and critiques of this theory based on experimental evidence and applications. Among the major papers are "Alternative Approaches to the Theory of Choice in Risk-Taking Situations," a masterly survey of subjective probability and choice theory, and "The Theory of Risk Aversion," an exposition of the theory of choice under uncertainty.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.This volume begins with Arrow's papers on statistical decision theory, which served as a foundation for his work on the economics of information. As he writes in his preface, "Statistical method was an example for the acquisition of information. In a world of uncertainty, it was no great leap to realize that information is valuable in an economic sense." The later, applied papers, which operationalize the theory of the early ones, include essays on the demand for information, the economic value of screening devices, and the effect of incomplete information on the structure of organizations, futures markets, and insurance.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.In this first volume, Arrow takes up the basic question of whether collective choices can be made in such a way as to reflect individual preferences. The seminal 1950 paper that opens the volume shows that given certain reasonable conditions that social choices must satisfy to reflect individual preferences, it is impossible to make a choice among all sets of alternatives without violating some of the conditions. The subsequent papers extend, deepen, and clarify these results and examine the concept of justice, both in the abstract and in economic models. The volume also contains searching critiques of the theories of justice of John Rawls and Robert Nozick.