An attractive feature of competitive markets is that they maximize the sum of consumer and producer surplus. Producer and consumer surplus are shown in the market supply and market demand diagram in Figure 7-4. Recall that the producer surplus for all producers is the area above the supply curve and below the market price line, and that the consumer surplus for all consumers is the area below t...

The labor surplus economy model has as its basic premise the inability of unskilled agricultural labor markets to clear in countries with high man/land ratios. In such situations, the marginal product of labor is likely to fall below a bargaining wage, related to the average rather than the marginal product. The reallocation of such disguisedly unemployed workers by means of “balanced” intersec...

This paper demonstrates that the economic surplus which agents produce in bilateral interactions is extractable by an outside party having sufficient initial resources. The third party achieves this outcome using a class of ‘‘exclusive-interaction’’ contracts. A basic extractability result is shown to be robust to several extensions: competition among outside parties, multiplicity of interactin...

The late Chile born biologist Francisco J. Varela has been influential in theoretical biology throughout the last three decades of the 20. century. His thinking shows a marked development from a biologically founded constructivism (developed together with his fellow citizen, Humberto Maturana, with the main key word being “autopoiesis theory”) to a more phenomenological oriented standpoint, whi...

I identify assumptions under which policies that maximize expected surplus are Pareto Optimal–even when expected consumer surplus does not even locally represent preferences over price-income lotteries. Besides the oft-made partial equilibrium assumptions that only one price varies, and that income changes do not affect demand, the two other assumptions are that every consumer’s indirect utilit...