Explorations in Pragmatic Economics

George A. Akerlof is Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Introduction ; PART 1: MICROECONOMICS ; 1. The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism ; 2. The Economics of Caste and of the Rate Race and Other Woeful Tales ; 3. Discriminatory, Status-based Wages among Tradition-oriented, Stochastically Trading Coconut Producers ; 4. Economics and Identity ; 5. The Economics of "Tagging" as Applied to the Optimal Income Tax, Welfare Programs, and Manpower Planning ; 6. An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States ; 7. Men Without Children ; 8. The Economic Consequences of Cognitive Dissonance ; 9. The Economics of Illusion ; 10. Procrastination and Obedience ; 11. Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit ; PART 2: MACROECONOMICS ; 12. Relative Wages and the Rate of Inflation ; 13. The Microeconomic Foundations of a Flow of Funds Theory of the Demand for Money ; 14. Irving Fisher on his Head: The Consequences of Constant Threshhold-Target Monitoring of Money Holdings ; 15. Jobs as Dam Sites ; 16. Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange ; 17. The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis anmd Unemployment ; 18. A Near-Rational Model of the Business Cycle, with Wage and Price Inertia ; 19. The Macroeconomics of Low Inflation ; 20. Behavioral Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Behavior