Bowles and Halliday capture the intellectual excitement, analytical precision, and policy relevance of the new microeconomics that has emerged over the past decades. Drawing on themes of the classical economists from Smith through Marx and 20th century writers - including Hayek, Coase, and Arrow - the authors use twenty-first century analytical methods to address enduring challenges in economics.
The subtitle of the work - Competition, conflict, and coordination - signals their focus on how the institutions of a modern capitalist economy work, introducing students to recent developments in the microeconomics of credit and labor markets with asymmetric information, a dynamic analysis of how firms compete going beyond price taking, as well as bargaining over the gains from exchange, social norms, and the exercise of power.
The new benchmark model proposed by Bowles and Halliday is based on an empirical approach to economic actors and problems. They start from the premise that contracts are incomplete, and that as a result market failures, rather than being a special case illustrated by environmental spillovers, are to be expected in markets for labor, credit, knowledge and throughout the economy. They explain how experiments show that human motivations include ethical as well as other-regarding preferences
(rather than entirely self-interested) and explain why the technologies of knowledge-based economies are a source of winner-take-all rather than stable competition. The authors also consider the intrinsic limits of mechanism design and governmental interventions in the economy.
