- Chinese Medicine Men
- Sherman Cochran
- In this book, Sherman Cochran reconsiders the nature and role of consumer culture in the spread of cultural globalization. Cochran brings to light enduring features of the Chinese experience with consumer culture. The history of Chinese medicine men in pre-socialist China, he suggests, has relevance for the twenty-first century because they achieved goals that their successors in contemporary China are currently seeking to attain.
- Hardcover 2006
- Free Riding
- Richard Tuck
- A proposition of contemporary economics and political science is that it would be an exercise of reason, not a failure of it, not to contribute to a collective project if the contribution is negligible, but to benefit from it nonetheless.Tuck makes careful distinctions between the prisoner’s dilemma problem, threshold phenomena such as voting, and free riding. He analyzes the notion of negligibility, and shows some of the logical difficulties in the idea—and how the ancient paradox of the sorites illustrates the difficulties.
- Hardcover 2008
- Social Economics
- Gary S. Becker
- Kevin M. Murphy
- Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy provide a testable, analytic framework for measuring how people make choices by including the social environment along with standard goods and services in their utility functions. These extended utility functions provide a way of analyzing how changes in the social environment affect people's choices and behaviors. More important, they also provide a way of analyzing how the social environment itself is determined by the interactions of individuals.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003