Transactions have always taken place. For hundreds of years that ‘place’ was a market or, more recently, a shopping mall. But in the past two decades these physical locations have increasingly been replaced by their virtual counterparts – online platforms. Here, author Michael C. Munger demonstrates how these platforms act as matchmakers or middlemen, a role traders have adopted since the very first exchanges thousands of years ago. The difference today is that the matchmakers often play n...

This book is an introduction to the logic and analytics of group choice. To understand how political institutions work, it is important to isolate what citizens - as individuals and as members of society - actually want. This book develops a means of 'representing' the preferences of citizens so that institutions can be studied more carefully. This is the first book to integrate the classical problem of constitutions with modern spatial theory, connecting Aristotle and Montesquieu with Arr...

With the growing popularity of apps such as Uber and Airbnb, there has been a keen interest in the rise of the sharing economy. Michael C. Munger brings these new trends in the economy down to earth by focusing on their relation to the fundamental economic concept of transaction costs. In doing so Munger brings a fresh perspective on the 'sharing economy' in clear and engaging writing that is accessible to both general and specialist readers. He shows how, for the first time, entrepreneurs...

There is no unified theory that can explain both voter choice and where choices come from. Hinich and Munger fill that gap with their model of political communication based on ideology.Rather than beginning with voters and diffuse, atomistic preferences, Hinich and Munger explore why large groups of voters share preference profiles, why they consider themselves "liberals" or "conservatives." The reasons, they argue, lie in the twin problems of communication and commitment that poli...

“Anyone concerned with social justice will find this book makes him question his assumptions, rethink his premises, and think!”—Andrew P. Morriss, professor, Bush School of Government and Public Service, School of Law, Texas A&M UniversityWhat is social justice?In these pages, twenty-one accomplished academics seek to do justice to “social justice.” Inequality exists and obviously causes rifts in societies. But it’s not obvious how the gover...

What will the economy look like in fifty years? How will our lives as consumers and workers be transformed by the coming innovations in technology, the marketplace, and the workplace? How will changes in demographics and dependency affect our political system? Will economic freedom rise or fall? What, if anything, would greater prosperity do for one’s total well-being?Future: Economic Peril or Prosperity? poses these and related questions to a diverse grou...

Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics presents a collection of papers analyzing the political systems of ten nations. It intends to provoke a conscious effort to compare, and investigate, the public choice of comparative politics.There have been many publications by public choice scholars, and many more by researchers who are at least sympathetic to the public choice perspective, yet little of this work has been integrated into the main stream of comparative political s...

Has growing concern about inequality led to proposals to remake American society according to ill-conceived and coercive "egalitarian" measures that are fundamentally unjust and harmful?This unique book reveals the modern romance with equality of outcomes as destructive folly. Those elites and bureaucrats who advocate such notions claim that they champion the poor—but more often than not the nostrums of this managerial class undermine, rather than advance, economic...