Competition

The essay provides a rational reconstruction and a critical assessment the different notions of competition elaborated in the course of the history of economic thought. In particular, it focuses on i) Competition as Rivarly in a Race; ii) Competition as a Specific Market Structure; iii) Competition as a Discovery Procedure and, finally, iv) Competition as Class Struggle. Moreover, it briefly discusses some issues concerning competition policy.

Recensione di A. Roncaglia (2000). Piero Sraffa. His life, thought and cultural heritage. London: Routledge

Review of Marcel Boumans and Matthias Klaes (eds) (2013). Mark Blaug: Rebel with Many Causes. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar

Mark Blaug passed away on November 18, 2011. To honor his memory, two events were held in March 2012: a Memorial Conference at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics, Rotterdam (NL), and a seminar hosted by the Scottish Centre for Economic Methodology at the University of Glasgow (UK). As Marcel Boumans and Matthias Klaes point out in their editorial Introduction, this book contains a collection of papers given at these two events and includes some additional papers submitted by people who were not able to attend the meetings “at such short notice” (p. 5). In addition, the book carries a Foreword by Alan Peacock and consists of two parts: part I has four chapters—written by John…

The Ricardian system: a graphical exposition

Ever since its publication, Pasinetti’s 1960 paper has been a primary reference for all scholars interested in Ricardian economics. However, Kaldor's 1955-6 diagram is a very effective tool for depicting the salient features of the Ricardian system and its full heuristic potentialities are still under-explored. Accordingly, we give it pride of place in this paper. In what follows, after a brief presentation of a slightly amended version of Kaldor’s original diagram, we show how this diagram may be modified to represent Pasinetti’s two-sector model of a closed economy. Next we use it to analyse alternative consumption patterns. Finally, we employ a variant of Kaldor’s diagram to study a two-…