Albert Hirschman (1915–2012) was an economist known for his influential interdisciplinary social science models. In the 1950s, he developed the theory of unbalanced growth, which changed development theory. Hirschman argued that partial effects induced by targeted investments can have positive economic impacts on the development of national economies. In another behavioural model – exit and voice, he explains how dissatisfied individuals can react and how these reactions may affect the quality of output provided in both private and public goods. Hirschman's ideas have been incorporated into many concepts in the social sciences.

Objectives: Perceptions towards euro adoption in the general public are very important for the successful introduction of the common currency into a given economy. Young consumers tend to have lower interest and political participation rates, but their acceptance of a new currency is crucial. This paper investigates a sample of Bulgarian students in order to measure and model the preferences of young consumers towards adopting a new national currency, and potentially glean insights that could be useful for the formulation of public policy. Methods/Approach: We survey a total of 296 predominantly young participants asking them both traditional demographic questions as well as behavioral and political ones such as social network and online video usage as well as policy stance and trust in institutions. The variables are used as predictors in a regression modelling framework that investigates the drivers behind the dynamics of euro perceptions. Results: We find a strong and robust effect of overall trust in institutions on perceptions towards the euro, as well as an expected effect of the policy preference. The higher trust in institutions leads to a more positive attitude towards the adoption of the common currency. Similarly, more right-leaning pro-market policy preferences are also associated with a more favorable view of the euro. While the consumption of online videos is unimportant, the overall time spent in social networks does have a statistically significant positive effect on preferences. Conclusions: The results give some initial directions as to what policy should be undertaken to most effectively inform young consumers on the benefits of adopting the euro as a new currency, and how this demographic can be segmented to deliver information most efficiently.

John Rogers Commons (1862-1945) was a prominent representative of American institutionalism in the early decades of the 20th century. As a political economist and sociologist, he developed an institutional approach, defining institutions as collective actions which take place within given norms such as law, habits, and customs. Additionally, he introduced the transaction as the smallest unit of interaction in economic theory. Commons' studies of the labour market, the role of law, and his social policy work in legislation made him one of the most influential proponents of old institutional economics.

Nearly 50 years ago, Mark Granovetter initiated a fundamental critique of economic theory. His critique was the starting point for the New Economic Sociology (NES). Particularly, he criticized the emerging theories of New Institutional Economics (NIE), focusing on the ideas of Oliver Williamson (1932–2020) who was one of the most prominent representatives of this school. In this paper we address this critique and Williamson’s response to it. Williamson argued from the perspective of transaction cost economics, while Granovetter focused on the social embeddedness of individuals. The impact of this debate on economics has resulted in an increased research interest in the role of institutions and social networks. However, both lines of thought did not bring economic and sociological theories together. NES established as a subdiscipline in Sociology. Its central concept of embeddedness continued to attract interest but proved to be of little empirical applicability. NIE, on the other hand, has become part of mainstream economics.

German Abstract: Wir argumentieren und zeigen anhand einer Fallstudie, dass der Preismechanismus Pay-What- You-Want bei spezifischen öffentlichen Gütern eingesetzt werden kann. Durch die Einnahmen aus freiwilligen Zahlungen kann eine Teilfinanzierung der Erstellungskosten erfolgen. Wir grenzen Pay-What-You-Want für öffentliche Güter von Spenden ab. Der Pay-What-You-Want Mechanismus ist dabei umfassender, als Spenden. Eine Fallstudie zeigt, dass mit relativ geringem Aufwand Einnahmen entstehen. Dies impliziert, dass wenn Nutzern öffentlicher Güter die Möglichkeit einer freiwilligen Zahlung eröffnet wird, diese Güter in größerer Menge beziehungsweise besserer Qualität erstellt werden können. English Abstract: We argue and employ a case study to show that the pay-what-you-want pricing mechanism can be applied to specific public goods. Revenues from voluntary payments can partially finance the production costs. We separate pay-what-you-want for public goods from donations and argue that the pay-what-you-want mechanism is more comprehensive than donations. A case study shows that revenues can be generated with moderate effort. This implies that if users of public goods are given the option of paying voluntarily, these goods can be produced in larger quantities or better quality.

Elinor Ostrom changed the way of thinking about common-pool resources in econom-ics. She provided an institutional analysis that shows how groups can find solutions to complex problems for collective goods. Ostrom showed that collective action can work among rational individuals. She and her husband Vincent objected privatization, nation-alization, and centralized government for governing the commons. Instead, they pro-moted polycentric governance as a solution for many common-pool resources. Her ap-proach is known as the Bloomington School of Political Economy, a thriving direction in Public Choice Theory.

George Josef Stigler is known as the scientist who strongly influenced the formation of the Chicago School of Economics. He promoted the idea of expanding price theory beyond the boundaries of economics and developed it into a universal model for the analysis of human behaviour, known as the economic approach to human behaviour. His research inspired the Public Choice literature and the Economic Theory of Law. Besides, Stigler made numerous contributions which nowadays are integral parts of economic theory. In this essay we summarize some of Stigler’s outstanding contributions, particularly his work on information economics and the economic theory of regulation.

Edward P. Lazear (1948-2020) is one of the most influential economists in the field of applied Labour Economics in modern time. He founded Personnel Economics, which applies an economic approach to Human Resources. His work linked traditional Labour Economics with the empirical analysis of behaviour in organizations (mostly private enterprises) and labour markets. He revolutionized thinking about Human Resources and integrated this field into economic analysis. His views stand in the tradition of the Chicago School of Economics. Besides his scientific work, Lazear was an influential political adviser. In this survey, we provide a short overview of some of his pathbreaking contributions. These include mandatory retirement, rank-order tournaments, incentive structures, and compensation schemes.

Harold Hotelling is an influential statistician working in the field of economic theory at the beginning of the 20th century. His contributions to economics are trailblazing and open new topics for economic and business analysis. His best-known work is his solution to the problem of exhaustible resources. He also triggered the exploration of spatial economics and the analysis of product differentiation through his solution of the optimal location of producers in a duopoly. Less known, but important, are his contributions to the development of modern neoclassical microeconomic theory. Hotelling is also one of the scientists who initiated the turn towards mathematical economics in the 1950s. In this paper we provide an introduction of his groundbreaking work on economic theory.

Heinrich von Stackelberg introduced several fundamental concepts to economic theory. His contributions to the analysis of market structure are the best-known ones. Since the 1930th his theory of the instability of markets is a cornerstone of theoretical economics. If firms make dependent and independent decisions in an oligopolistic market structure, the outcome is rarely a stable equilibrium. The concept of Stackelberg-leader and Stackelberg-follower is immanent in many real-world business situations. However, only after the emergence of game theory and linear programming the full potential of Stackelberg’s contributions has become apparent. In cost theory and the theory of monopoly, he provided some of the basic principles that became part of economic textbooks. First-semester students of economics and business administration are studying these theories even 80 years after Stackelberg introduced them. In this comment, we refer to his two major works on market structures and cost theory.

Certain religious entrepreneurial minded communities are highly successful. It is tempting to assume that the underlying social mechanism of business success can be used as a blueprint for the development of larger social entities. Recently, Javaid, Shamsi and Hyder (2020) have argued that inefficiencies of markets and bureaucracies may be avoided if religious entrepreneurial communities are considered an alternative for members’ business investment, capital- and expertise-support to businesses, and the redistribution of wealth in favor of economically vulnerable community members. Consequently, the title of their paper is “Religious entrepreneurial communities as a solution for socioeconomic injustice”. I address this problematic position by an extended comment and point out inefficiencies induced by such an approach. I apply the concepts of networks and clubs to tackle problems of religious entrepreneurial communities as sub-groups of larger social entities. Individual beliefs, individual preferences, and norms of cooperative behavior can occur among members of any community, with or without common religious beliefs. Consequently, a shift from the areligious, market-oriented form of economic organization towards specific sets of religious beliefs will not, by itself, endanger business success. These issues require considerable attention before a transfer of behavioral pattern prevalent in small communities can be applied to larger groups. I emphasize the danger of generalizations from small case study results of specific entrepreneurial communities to larger social entities, such as societies. Viewpoint Keywords: Entrepreneurial communities; Socioeconomic justice; Community-based entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurship-based policy, Clubs, Networks Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Egbert, H. (2021). Religious Entrepreneurial Communities: Solution for or Cause of Socioeconomic Injustice? A Comment. Journal of Entrepreneurship, Business and Economics , 9 (2), 113–131.

Frank Knight (1885⎯1972) was an exceptional social scientist and a prolific writer of many reviews and comments on topics in economic theory, philosophy, and ethics. In economics he is best known for his work on uncertainty as a cause for entrepreneurial profit in competitive markets. This is only one of his many contributions that put the market and the price mechanism at center stage. In contrast to many other neoclassical writers, he vehemently criticized the market as a guiding principle to form a society since the market is unethical. Knight considered the economy as a social system and the economic approach as one among many others in social sciences. Knight is a founding father of the Chicago School of Economics. Several of his students became Nobelists.

Mancur Olson (1932-1998) became famous with one great idea: the failure of collective action. Since interest groups provide their members with public (collective) goods with corresponding externalities, he assumed that free riding as a rational individual strategy would be a ubiquitous problem hampering the realization of efficient collective action in the provision of such goods. This remarkable idea – the application of methodological individualism and the assumption of rational individual behavior in the analysis of interest groups, provided a fertile ground for theory building in all social sciences, most notably in political science. In the field of economics, Olson’s ideas contributed to the establishment of the Public Choice Theory and became a prerequisite for fundamental research in experimental economics – on public goods, voluntary contribution mechanisms and games such as the prisoner dilemma. The present paper briefly discusses his two best-known books.

Joan Robinson (1903-1983) is an outstanding Cambridge economist in a variety of aspects. Being a member of the inner circle around Keynes and discussing with him drafts of the „General Theory“ in the early 1930s, she became an ardent defender of Keynes' original ideas. Her first major work is the „Theory of Imperfect Competition“, which became the standard model for depicting real markets as compared to the model of perfect competition. Her work on Marx reintegrated part of his ideas into economic thought while rejecting ideological Marxism. Due to her favoritism of left ideas, her disputes with neoclassical or orthodox economists, and her advocacy of communist regimes after the Second World War, Robinson is also regarded as one of the most controversial economists of her time.

A briefly summary is given of the path-breaking ideas of Gordon Tullock (1922-2014). Tullock can be considered one of the founders of public choice. He initiated a new way of thinking and applied rational choice theory to the political and juridical system. His ideas of rent-seeking behavior, majority voting, bureaucratic inefficiency, constitutional design, and the transfer of the public good problem to political decisions have become cornerstones of economic thought.

This paper presents an experiment, which builds a bridge over the gap between neuroscience and the analysis of economic behaviour. We apply the mathematical theory of Pavlovian conditioning, known as Recurrent Associative Gated Dipole (READ), to analyse consumer choices in a computer-based experiment. Supplier reputations, consumer satisfaction, and customer reactions are operationally defined and, together with prices, related to READ’s neural dynamics. We recorded our participants’ decisions with their timing, and then mapped those decisions on a sequence of events generated by the READ model. To achieve this, all constants in the differential equations were determined using simulated annealing with data from 129 people. READ predicted correctly 96% of all consumer choices in a calibration sample (n = 1290), and 87% in a test sample (n = 903), thus outperforming logit models. The rank correlations between self-assessed and dipole-generated consumer satisfactions were 89% in the calibration sample and 78% in the test sample, surpassing by a wide margin the best linear regression model.

A short summary is made of William Baumols’ contributions to economic theory. Baumol (1922-2017) had a vivid interest in many different areas within the field of economics and substantially improved (in co-authorship) the quality of the research on the theory of environmental economics, industrial organization and entrepreneurship. The focus of the present paper is placed on his work on entrepreneurship. The institutional framework of a society makes its entrepreneurs either productive or unproductive and in some cases even destructive. This logic implies that economic policy can be used in order to make entrepreneurs become productive for a society and thus to induce growth, wealth and development.

The purpose of the paper is to review recent studies on Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing and to identify research gaps in the recently mushrooming literature on the topic. We examine a total of 53 empirical studies published between 2009 and 2016. In contrast to previous reviews we classify the research according to the type of study, i.e. the applied research methodology. That is why we discuss separately laboratory experiments, field experiments, survey experiments and case studies. Based on this descriptive review we identify the following two gaps in the study on PWYW pricing: (1) studies on PWYW pricing for high cost goods, and (2) studies on the long-term effects of PWYW pricing.

We provide a short introduction into the concept of Constitutional Economics. This approach is a subfield within Public Choice Theory. Public Choice and Constitutional Economics are closely related to the name of James Buchanan who, together with his colleagues, initiated Public Choice Theory in the 1950’s and Constitutional Economics in the 1980’s. The latter emphasizes the choice of these rules, e.g. the constitutional framework of a society that structures social order. The choice of rules is modeled as acts of exchange in the political process.