Allocation, Distribution, and Policy : Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics / Samuel Bowles.

Intro -- Allocation, Distribution, and Policy -- Preface -- Introduction: Doing Post-Walrasian Microeconomics -- ``If you are not doing something, you are not learning anything'' -- Post-Walrasian microeconomics: A new set of benchmark models -- What should economics be about? -- By necessity, post-Walrasian microeconomics is dynamic, multi-disciplinary, and pluralist -- Strategic Interactions -- The language of game theory -- Risk dominance in the Plant or Steal Game -- Monitoring, working, and mixed strategies -- Nash's ``American Way,'' collective action, and alternative equilibrium concepts -- Residential segregation and integration as Nash equilibria -- Preferences, Beliefs, and Behavior -- An offer you can refuse: Inequality aversion -- Reciprocity and Bayesian Nash equilibrium -- Other-regarding preferences: Altruism and reciprocity -- Incentives may crowd out ethical and other-regarding preferences -- Inferring control-averse preferences from experiments -- Public Goods, Mechanism Design, and the Social Multiplier -- The social multiplier of a tax on cigarettes -- Public goods and common property resources -- Private under-provision of a public good -- An optimal subsidy for public goods provision -- Conflict over who will produce a household public good -- Teamwork and optimal contracts -- Coordination Failures: A Taxonomy -- The tragedy of fishers: A common property resource coordination failure -- Footloose jobs and fiscal competition -- Conspicuous consumption as a ``public bad'' -- Residential segregation as a coordination failure -- Interdependence and coordination: A taxonomy -- Environmental Coordination Failures and Institutional Responses -- The Tragedy of the Fishers revisited -- Averting the tragedy: Privatization -- Averting the tragedy: Optimal taxes and government regulation -- Averting the tragedy: Civil society -- Disrupting a carbon trap to promote electronic vehicle adoption -- Bargaining: Mutual Gains and Conflicts over their Distribution -- Deadheads vs. nerds: Coasean bargaining and state intervention as complements -- Bargaining power in the Nash solution -- Investing in bargaining power with transaction-specific assets -- The war of attrition: How bargaining may exhaust the potential gains to cooperation -- Principals and Agents: Contracts, Norms, and Power -- An incomplete contract: Difficult-to-measure quality -- Renter as agent, landlord as principal -- Quality control: The Benetton model -- Rental of capital goods as a principal agent problem -- Economic Classes and Incomplete Contracts -- Sharecropping and incomplete labor contracts -- Class conflict and the choice of contracts -- Constrained choice under contrasting contracts -- Work and Wages -- A Walrasian labor market equilibrium -- Employment and labor discipline -- Employment and labor discipline: Applications -- Fair wages: Inequality-averse norms and best responses -- Endogenous technology and workplace amenities with incomplete contracts -- Buy this job: Can rent-seeking employers clear the labor market? -- The no-shirking condition and choice of technique: Efficiency vs. control -- Credit Markets and Wealth Constraints -- Robinson Crusoe and the Walrasian credit market -- Wealth matters in credit markets: Excluded and quantity-constrained borrowers -- Pareto-improving egalitarian redistribution -- Repeated interactions in the credit market -- An alternative (no-shirking type) principal-agent model of the credit market -- When does titling the wealth of the poor not help them? The de Soto effect -- Wealth constraints: Why the poor face a limited set of contractual opportunities -- Risk and Inequality: Redistribution as Insurance -- Taking risks: Basics -- Free tuition: Can it be fair to those who will not continue their education? -- Is equality the enemy of innovation? -- Inequality: Institutions, Market Structure, and Policy -- A summary of economic differences among people: The Gini coefficient -- Inequality and average income -- Network structure, bargaining, and inequality -- Product market structure and the distribution of income -- Experimenting with history: Market structure, the wage curve, and rising inequality in the U.S. -- Monopsony and the minimum wage -- A rent-seeking state: Politics as who gets what, when, and how -- Endogenous Preferences: The Evolution of Cooperation -- Conformist learning and altruistic preferences -- The evolution of cooperation: Repeated interactions, segmentation, and punishment of free riders -- Learning, imitation, and segmentation -- Community, cooperation, and the gains from trade -- The Evolution of Conflict over the Distribution of Gains from Cooperation -- Conspiracy of doves, bourgeois invasion -- Conformist Hawks and Doves -- Risk dominance and evolutionary stable distributional conventions -- Lords and Merchants -- Collective action: Payoffs and conformism -- Projects: From Learning Economics to Doing Economics -- An employment subsidy (or wage subsidy) -- The private exercise of power -- Domestic ``labor discipline'': Can the principal agent model be ``exported''? -- The BIG idea: An incentive-compatible revenue-neutral guaranteed income -- The dual economy and history's hockey sticks -- After NAFTA: The distribution of the gains from trade in a dual economy -- Apartheid because of or in spite of capitalism -- How gig work will affect the whole economy -- The whole economy effect of AI and robotics -- Bibliography -- Glossary -- Index.

Microeconomics has been transformed in recent decades by the increasing use of game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary modeling, network economics, mechanism design and attention to limited competition and asymmetric information. Bowles and Chen provide problem sets and exam questions (with carefully explained solutions) based on the new microeconomics, engaging learners with applications to income distribution, limited competition in goods and labor markets, climate change, and other public policy topics.Background notes explain the underlying concepts, their origin in the thinking of the great economists of the past, applications to macroeconomics, and relevant empirical evidence.This work provides a problem-based and policy oriented approach to teaching microeconomics, development, labor, environment, public economics and topics in business, management and public policy to upper level undergraduates, masters and doctoral students.

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