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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a discourse analytical understanding of the political economy. The term “crisis” is an important label in recent discussion in political economy. Yet the genuine discursive dimension of “the crisis” and the multiple linguistic layers of the crisis discourse remains an open issue.

Realist perspectives usually believe in an external reality of crises independent of the language construction; in contrast, constructivist perspectives argue that a crisis is always the result of a socio-linguistic construction process. This contribution follows a critical-constructivist perspective, thereby taking into account powerful discursive actors which are able to “declare” a state in the world as a “crisis”.

From a discourse analytical point of view, this paper examines the rules and logics of crisis management policy, arguing that a new politico-academic elite has appeared which is beyond the classical distinction between “Keynesians” and “neo-liberals”. By taking a position in the discourse of the recent debate on financial regulation, these new elite might be able to manage the crisis for a particular time, as they are constructed as “moderating actors” through academic and political discourses.

From a practical point of view, this analysis cannot offer economic solutions; from an analytical viewpoint, it will not give insights into discursive contexts.

This analysis helps to understand current debates on economic policy and to improve the communicative efficiency of the participants.

This paper combines a discourse analysis with a governmentality perspective and applies this analytical tool onto a political and economic topic currently prevailing in the global political economy.

The purpose of this article is to show how a particular marketing paradigm developed in Denmark from the 1920s through to the 1960s. It peaked in the mid‐1950s and faded out with one major publication in the early 1970s. This article aims to provide a relatively detailed study of the initial phases of the school and its key ideas.

The study is based on primary sources, i.e. the writings of the scholars who shaped and developed the school. A significant number of the sources are available in Danish only.

While the study of marketing in America developed from the inductive, descriptive approach of the German Historical School, an essential precondition for the Copenhagen approach was the second wave of microeconomic theory of the 1930s. The article argues that it was a marketing management school, and that it offered early contributions to the development of marketing theory.

Relatively little has been written about Danish and Scandinavian history of marketing thought. The authors believe that a detailed review of the Copenhagen School of Marketing may be of some interest to marketing historians around the world.

The object of this paper is to demonstrate that the promotion of altruistic behavior can in fact be regarded as an instrument of public policy.

This objective is achieved by adapting the standard theory of consumer behavior in microeconomics to the context of an individual who is exposed to the pursuit of altruistic and self‐fulfilling egoistical goals.

The conceptualization permits the distinction between types of welfare benefits that emerge from the pursuit of these different goals and demonstrate the presence of a welfare benefit transformation frontier. The framework permits the evaluation of policy instruments such as tax incentives and legislations to promote altruistic behavior.

The paper combines concepts in behavioral economics with those in standard microeconomics to demonstrate policy measures that are usually not considered within policy circles.

A discipline is bound by some combination of a shared subject matter, shared theory, and shared technique. Yet modern economics is seemingly without limit to its domain. As a discipline without a shared subject matter, what is the binding force of economics today? The authors combine topic modeling and text analysis to analyze different approaches to inquiry within the discipline of economics. The authors find that the importance of theory has declined as economics has increasingly become defined by its empirical techniques. The authors question whether this trajectory is stable in the long run as the binding force of the discipline.

The present essay re-examines the scope of Sraffa’s critique of Marshall’s supply curves that the former developed in his 1925 and 1926 articles showing that neoclassical supply curves derived from non-proportional returns are not robust both in the short and in the long run. After examining what a short-run and a long-run equilibrium means both for the original Sraffa’s articles and for Marshall’s pioneer contribution, the chapter discusses the common procedure in conventional economics to introduce the limitations to the growth of the firm. The argument of the chapter will be based on the 1920s articles as well as on the ‘Lectures on Advanced Theory of Value’ delivered in 1928–1931 by Sraffa at Cambridge University, now publicly available online by the Wren library, Trinity College, Cambridge. For short-run analysis, it must be assumed that the number of firms is fixed. This assumption entails serious problems with regards to the notions of competition and competitive behaviour. For long-run analysis, the sources of increasing costs are problems of management and control. However, this idea is untenable both on logical and empirical grounds. We argue that contemporary mainstream microeconomic treatment of costs and supply in the context of perfect competition still presents several problems. These problems, rather than being superficial, lie at the root of the supply and demand approach of value and distribution.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of online video mini-lectures, intended to complement in-class teaching by allowing students to review the more technical aspects of the course.

Online video mini-lectures/tutorials, covering the technical components of the course, were introduced two-thirds of the way through a Principles of Microeconomics course. This methodology allows for the estimation of the impact of incorporating this technology on student performance. In addition, comparisons using results from previous terms, in which these videos were not available at any point during the course, allow for an examination of the overall impact of this technology on student performance in the last portion of the course.

The results point to online lectures improving student achievement, but that this improvement is mostly achieved by the lower achieving students, and exhibits significant diminishing returns to the number of times the videos are watched. As such, the videos are shown to help students who were struggling with the material, but that there is little value to exclusively watching the videos multiple times.

As technology impacts higher education, many wonder what role instructors will play. This study examines a unique implementation of technology within a traditional classroom, indicating that technology can serve as a complement to in-class teaching.

Compares Stackelberg’s Grundlagen der theoretischen Volkswirtschaftslehre with a standard modern micro‐economic textbook. Reveals some confusing shortcomings in the English translation. Focuses on unique peculiarities of Stackelberg’s analysis of the price formation on imperfect markets. Suggests that it might be an effective approach in a course on micro‐economics to combine a modern textbook with Grundlagen since they would complement each other in a number of aspects: at least, but very important, in the different emphasis of the time aspect. Finds that in general the English translation of Grundlagen by A.T. Peacock is of an outstanding quality. Mistakes are rare and hardly ever confusing, with the exceptions related to the perfect market and pure competition concepts. So, if one uses the English translation of Grundlagen as a supplement in a course on micro‐economics one may devote some attention to these concepts. It is quite possible that Stackelberg, at least in Grundlagen, is not convinced of the potential compatibility of Chamberlin’s theory of monopolistic competition and the Edgeworth‐Bertrand oligopoly theory with the method he proposes to derive at “peculiarities of price formation in the imperfect market”. Hence the absence of any reference in Grundlagen to these theories may not be at all accidental.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the preferences of parent founders within family businesses in selecting a suitable successor with the increase in life expectancy.

The study presents alternative decision-making preference models of a suitable succession for parent founders based on the models of microeconomic theory in the context of family businesses.

The theories and models of economics in the current study illustrate that the increase in the life expectancy of the parent founders with their decisions toward the preference of a suitable successor under the age constraint may restrict the sustainability of their family businesses. As a result, the opportunity cost theory appears as to be at the ahead of the other theories in microeconomics in order to support the decision making of parent founders on selecting the suitable successor for the future of the family business.

The paper illustrates the models on the preferences of the parent founder for the future of the family businesses with their perception toward the increase in overall life expectancy. The current study is limited to the perspectives of founder entrepreneurs toward an effective succession decision. Future research may consider the perspectives of in-family as well as non-family successors.

In the light of alternative preference decision-making models for parent founders for choosing a suitable successor under the age constraint, this study will make a noteworthy contribution to the sustainable growth of their family businesses. The approach of this study through the microeconomics not only methodologically contributes to the body of knowledge in aging and employment in general, but also to the intergenerational relationships of parent founders, especially their succession-related plans at their early stages of career.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a microeconomic-based approach to support fund-allocation decisions for a large number of assets. Under the prevailing financial constraints and rapid deterioration of facilities, arriving at optimum fund allocation for capital renewal projects has become very challenging. Due to the complexity of modeling multi-year life cycle cost analysis, existing fund-allocation methods have serious drawbacks when handling a large portfolio of assets, and their results are difficult to justify.

This paper adopts well-established theories from microeconomics and proposes a new microeconomic-based decision support framework that has two novel components: a heuristic procedure to optimize and justify fund-allocation decisions by balancing the funding among the different asset categories; and a visual what-if analysis approach inspired by the economic indifference maps.

Applying the proposed framework on a real case study of 800 building components proved that optimum decisions can be achieved through an equilibrium state at which fair and equitable allocations are made such that the utility per dollar is balanced for all asset categories. The visual what-if analysis approach presented a powerful graphical tool to visualize decisions, along with their costs and benefits, and facilitate sensitivity analysis under changes in budget levels.

This paper, using the proposed microeconomic framework, sheds a new light on how fund-allocation optimization problems can be simplified, from an economic perspective, to arrive at accurate and justifiable decisions for a large portfolio of facilities.