In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.
In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. When there is no externality, allocative efficiency is achieved; however, this rarely happens in the free market. Economists often urge governments to adopt policies that will "internalize" an externality, so that costs and benefits will affect mainly parties who choose to incur them.
In economics and related disciplines, a transaction cost is a cost in making any economic trade when participating in a market.
Regulation is an abstract concept of management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. For example:
Collective action refers to action taken together by a group of people whose goal is to enhance their status and achieve a common objective. It is a term that has formulations and theories in many areas of the social sciences including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and economics.
In game theory, coordination games are a class of games with multiple pure strategy Nash equilibria in which players choose the same or corresponding strategies.
An unfair labor practice in US labor law refers to certain actions taken by employers or unions that violate the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 29 U.S.C. § 151–169 and other legislation. Such acts are investigated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
In game theory, the core is the set of feasible allocations that cannot be improved upon by a subset of the economy's agents. A coalition is said to improve upon or block a feasible allocation if the members of that coalition are better off under another feasible allocation that is identical to the first except that every member of the coalition has a different consumption bundle that is part of an aggregate consumption bundle that can be constructed from publicly available technology and the initial endowments of each consumer in the coalition.
A win–win game is game theory which is designed in a way that all participants can profit from the game in one way or the other. In conflict resolution, a win–win strategy is a collaborative strategy and conflict resolution process that aims to accommodate all participants. In economics, it is a voluntary transaction where both parties gain wealth, as in the double thank-you of capitalism.
The Commission for Environmental Cooperation was established by Canada, Mexico, and the United States to implement the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), the environmental side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The CEC's mission is to facilitate cooperation and public participation to foster conservation, protection and enhancement of the North American environment for the benefit of present and future generations, in the context of increasing economic, trade and social links among Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Arbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), is a way to resolve disputes outside the courts. The dispute will be decided by one or more persons, which renders the "arbitration award". An arbitration award is legally binding on both sides and enforceable in the courts.
A strong Nash equilibrium is a Nash equilibrium in which no coalition, taking the actions of its complements as given, can cooperatively deviate in a way that benefits all of its members. While the Nash concept of stability defines equilibrium only in terms of unilateral deviations, strong Nash equilibrium allows for deviations by every conceivable coalition. This equilibrium concept is particularly useful in areas such as the study of voting systems, in which there are typically many more players than possible outcomes, and so plain Nash equilibria are far too abundant.
The two-person bargaining problem studies how two agents share a surplus that they can jointly generate. It is in essence a payoff selection problem. In many cases, the surplus created by the two players can be shared in many ways, forcing the players to negotiate which division of payoffs to choose. There are two typical approaches to the bargaining problem. The normative approach studies how the surplus should be shared. It formulates appealing axioms that the solution to a bargaining problem should satisfy. The positive approach answers the question how the surplus will be shared. Under the positive approach, the bargaining procedure is modeled in detail as a non-cooperative game.
The title-transfer theory of contract (TTToC) is a legal interpretation of contracts developed by economist Murray Rothbard and jurist Williamson Evers. The theory interprets all contractual obligations in terms of property rights, viewing a contract as a bundle of title transfers. The TTToC stands in oppositions to most mainstream contract theories which view contractual obligations as the result of a binding promise. Proponents of the approach often claim it is superior on grounds of both consistency and ethical considerations. The TTToC is often supported by libertarians.
Workers' self-management is a form of organizational management based on self-directed work processes on the part of an organization's workforce. Self-management is a characteristic of many forms of socialism, with proposals for self-management having appeared many times throughout the history of the socialist movement, advocated variously by market socialists, communists, and anarchists.
