Political economy of fairness
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Bibliographic Information
Political economy of fairness
MIT Press, 1996
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
First MIT Press paperback ed., 1996
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Political Economy of Fairness covers the main advances of fairness theory, providing a vocabulary of concepts and terms that will allow more efficient and informed communication about policy.
How should the government balance the aims of justice and economic efficiency when intervening in the economy? In Political Economy of Fairness Edward Zajac seeks not only to raise the level of the fairness-economic efficiency debate, but to show both the importance and the difficulty (illustrated by the ongoing struggle of the Supreme Court to put meaning into the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts) of getting the economic theory right in executing fairness-motivated policy. He also reveals both the pervasiveness of government interference in the marketplace and the generality of the stakeholders-fairness-efficiency paradigm as an organizing framework for identifying and analyzing the interaction of the major elements in the policy debates. Political Economy of Fairness covers the main advances of fairness theory, providing a vocabulary of concepts and terms that will allow more efficient and informed communication about policy. It explains these sometimes quite difficult concepts in clear language with maximum appeal to intuition and little mathematics and reviews the experimental work of economists as well as the more standard approaches of moral philosophers.
Part I looks at how economists understand and commonly define the concepts of efficiency, costs, prices, exit/entry, externalities, public goods, firms, risks and incentives, and principal-agent theory. Part II reviews fairness theory, including the basic elements of the theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, utilitarianism, and superfairness, and the extensive work of experimental economists to develop positive theories of fairness. Part III covers economic theories of regulation and government intervention, introducing the different concepts of taxation, "cures" for market failures, theories of public choice, and rent seeking. Zajac concludes this part by observing that incentive-compatible regulation appears to economists as the most promising approach to government intervention.The book closes with several case studies that illustrate recurrent themes in regulation and policy. The case studies include progressive taxation, unfair pricing (cross-subsidization and predatory pricing and dumping), mergers and acquisitions, and health, safety, and environmental regulation.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Basic economic concepts and ideas: introduction and overview
- the concept of economic efficiency
- more economic concepts
- externalities and public goods
- on firms (private or public organizations)
- risk and incentives - principal-agent theory. Part 2 Fairness theory: a brief intellectual history of the economist's current ethical outlook
- normative theories I - John Rawls
- normative theories II - Robert Nozick, utilitarianism and superfairness
- positive theories I - the formal principle of distributive justice and institutional framing
- positive theories II - perceived economic justice in public utility regulation
- strategic uses of fairness. Part 3 Normative and positive economic theories of regulation: public interest (normative) economic theories of regulation
- interest group (positive) economic theories of regulation - incentive-compatible regulation. Part 4 Case studies and applications: introduction to part 4
- progressive taxation
- unfair pricing I - cross-subsidization
- unfair pricing II - predatory pricing and dumping - whose ox is being gored?
- evaluating assets fairly - the example of public utility
- the supreme court's struggle with mergers and breakups
- attempts to break out of the regulatory straitjacket, fairly
- social regulation - a medley of the power of the media, efficiency, utilitarianism and individual rights.
by "Nielsen BookData"