Archive for 10 October 2008
Essays on Cournot
| Peter Klein |
Martin Shubik reviews Jean-Philippe Touffut’s edited volume Augustin Cournot: Modelling Economics (Elgar, 2007) for EH.Net. Contributors deal with Cournot’s contributions to economics, probability theory, and statistics, with mixed results (according to Shubik, who thinks Cournot’s contributions to game theory deserved more ink). Shubik thinks Cournot was “not only was a mathematician and probabilist, he was an excellent modeler linking the economic world with basic abstract models . . . [particularly the] modeling and application of a mutually consistent expectations model to oligopoly and economic competition.”
Shubik opens the review with this interesting (if a touch immodest) anecdote:
In the early 1950s, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, I had two academic heroes. They were Cournot and Edgeworth (in my lesser Pantheon were Jevons and Walras). As soon as John Nash discussed his thesis on noncooperative games with me, I pointed out to him that his solution which was mathematically highly general was in essence the one that Cournot had applied to economics and had presented in his great book of 1838. The solution called for individual mutually consistent expectations. At that time game theory in either cooperative or noncooperative form was virtually ignored in economics. It seemed to me that this natural extension of Cournot, whose work was unknown to Nash, was going to extend the scope of oligopolistic studies considerably. Nash and I were joined by John Mayberry in writing an article accepted by _Econometrica_ (“A Comparison of Treatments of a Duopoly Situation,” 1953, 141-54.) This, I believe was the first treatment of oligopoly expanding on Cournot’s work utilizing modern game theory. The mathematical tools were being forged to expand vastly the noncooperative equilibrium methods to economics so brilliantly started by Cournot.
In his introduction to Menger’s Principles Hayek expresses surprise that Menger, unlike Jevons and Walras, seemed unfamiliar with Cournot.
JOM Special Issue on the Resource-Based Theory of the Firm
| Peter Klein |
Jay Barney, Dave Ketchen, and Mike Wright are editing a special issue of the Journal of Management on “Resource-Based Theory: Twenty Years of Accomplishments and Future Challenges.” Proposals should be submitted between 1 March and 1 April 2009 for an issue to appear in 2011, the 20th anniversary of the 1991 special issue of JOM that helped establish the field (particularly with Barney’s paper, “Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage,” which has 9,889 cites on Google Scholar as of this posting). The full call for papers is below the fold. (more…)
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