In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants.
A market economy is an economic system in which the decisions regarding investment, production and distribution to the consumers are guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand. The major characteristic of a market economy is the existence of factor markets that play a dominant role in the allocation of capital and the factors of production.
Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.
In economics, industrial organization is a field that builds on the theory of the firm by examining the structure of firms and markets. Industrial organization adds real-world complications to the perfectly competitive model, complications such as transaction costs, limited information, and barriers to entry of new firms that may be associated with imperfect competition. It analyzes determinants of firm and market organization and behavior on a continuum between competition and monopoly, including from government actions.
Industrial relations or employment relations is the multidisciplinary academic field that studies the employment relationship; that is, the complex interrelations between employers and employees, labor/trade unions, employer organizations, and the state.
John Thomas Dunlop was an American administrator, labor economist, and educator. Dunlop was the United States Secretary of Labor between 1975 and 1976 under President Gerald Ford. He was Director of the United States Cost of Living Council from 1973 to 1974, Chairman of the United States Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations from 1993 to 1995, which produced the Dunlop Report in 1994. He was also arbitrator and impartial chairman of various United States labor-management committees, and a member of numerous government boards on industrial relations disputes and economic stabilization.
Ernesto Cortés, Jr. is the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) co-chair and executive director of the West / Southwest IAF regional network.
Susan Catharine Eaton was an American political scientist and workers' rights activist. Eaton was an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, who became a nursing home researcher at Harvard and workers' activist. She wrote about health care management, women's role in union leadership and work-family issues and gender equity in the workplace.
Edward Hastings Chamberlin was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Charles Fredrick Sabel is an American academic and professor of Law and Social Science at the Columbia Law School. His research centers on public innovations, European Union governance, labor standards, economic development, and ultra-robust networks.
The Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA), was founded in 1947 as the Industrial Relations Research Association. LERA is an organization for professionals in industrial relations and human resources. Headquartered at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the organization has more than 3,000 members at the national level and in its local chapters. LERA is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that draws its members from the ranks of academia, management, labor and "neutrals".
Walter Galenson was a professor of economics at Cornell University and a noted U.S. labor historian and economist.
Leila Farsakh is a Palestinian political economist who was born in Jordan and is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her area of expertise is Middle East Politics, Comparative Politics, and the Politics of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Farsakh holds a MPhil from the University of Cambridge, UK (1990) and a PhD from the University of London (2003).
Thomas A. Kochan is a professor of industrial relations, work and employment. He is the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has been a faculty member since 1980.
Frederic Michael Scherer is an American economist and expert on industrial organization. Since 2006, he continues as a professor of economics at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University.
Franklin Marvin Fisher was an American economist. He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 2004.
Suzanne Doris Berger is an American political scientist. She is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative. A leading authority in comparative politics and political economy, she has pointed to the centrality of politics in mediating and redirecting ostensibly transcendent forces, such as economic modernization and globalization.
Gilles Saint-Paul is a French economist at Paris School of Economics. He also is a scientific advisor to the Economic Studies Directorate at the French Ministry of the Environment. His main interests include the political economy of unemployment and how information technology affects wage inequality.
Disequilibrium macroeconomics is a tradition of research centered on the role of disequilibrium in economics. This approach is also known as non-Walrasian theory, equilibrium with rationing, the non-market clearing approach, and non-tâtonnement theory. Early work in the area was done by Don Patinkin, Robert W. Clower, and Axel Leijonhufvud. Their work was formalized into general disequilibrium models, which were very influential in the 1970s. American economists had mostly abandoned these models by the late 1970s, but French economists continued work in the tradition and developed fixprice models.
Richard Michael Locke is Dean of Apple University. Locke left academia after serving as the 13th provost of Brown University. He was Brown's fourth Provost in six years, after his predecessor, Vicki Colvin, announced her resignation after less than one year in the position.
