Property Rights, Consumption and the Market Process

Book excerpt: In this book David Emanuel Andersson undertakes the difficult task of reconciling institutional theories of property rights, transaction costs and norms, with Austrian economics, Lancaster s consumer theory, regional economics and evolutionary economics. The result is a success, the connections outlined make sense and convincing illustrative cases are offered. The book should be read by everyone interested in how the challenges to neoclassical equilibrium theory that have emerged since the 1960s are related. Per-Olof Bjuggren, Jönköping University, Sweden Property Rights, Consumption and the Market Process extends property rights theory in new and exciting directions by combining complementary insights from Austrian, institutional and evolutionary economics. Mainstream economics tends to analyse property rights within a static equilibrium framework. In this book David Andersson reformulates property rights theory as an evolutionary theory of the market process. This original work includes many valuable insights and new analysis such as: combining Yoram Barzel s theory of property rights, Ludwig Lachmann s theory of capital, the resource-based view of the firm and the entrepreneurship theories of Frank Knight, Joseph Schumpeter and Israel Kirzner applying Ronald Inglehart s theory of value change to discontinuities in how imitative behaviour influences consumer choice a new distributional perspective on the Hayekian knowledge problem a model of consumer choice that combines lexicographic characteristics and learning processes a methodological approach that considers the perceived causal and evidential utilities of a theory original empirical material (hedonic price functions and case studies) and new areas of application for important computer simulation results. David Andersson s book will be warmly welcomed by heterodox economists and new institutional economists, as well as economists of entrepreneurship studies, regional development and urban planning.