Alain Marciano

• Ph. D. in economics
• University Professor (Full) at University of Turin

This article describes the intellectual trajectory James Buchanan followed from the early 1950s, when he started to work on "spillover effects," to the mid-1960s, when he had completed a consistent explanation of the efficiency of market mechanisms and private arrangements in the presence of externalities. We show that, in contrast with what most e...

Market failures, which are usually viewed as a consequence of self-interest, are also supposed to be a major justification for coercive state interventions. This was the view of, among others, Richard Musgrave and Paul Samuelson, but not of James Buchanan. The latter certainly admitted that individuals are self-interested, that markets fail to allo...

This article introduces Buchanan's comment on Tiebout's “A Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditures”. It helps us to understand the nature of the relationship between Buchanan and Tiebout. Usually, it is claimed that Buchanan modelled Tiebout's insights, that there exists a Buchanan-Tiebout hypothesis, and that Buchanan in 1965 complemented what Ti...

The purpose of this article is to analyse the way economists interested in social and economic evolution cite, mention or refer to Darwin. We focus on the attitude of economists towards Darwin’s theory of social evolution – an issue he considered as central to his theory. We show that economists refer to and mention Darwin as a biologist and neglec...

This article examines how James Buchanan came to write Public Principles of Public Debt , his first sole-authored book. We explore the evolution of Buchanan’s views on public debt, particularly his rejection of the three central propositions of what he called the “new orthodoxy.” We show how he initially recognized the significance of Ricardian equ...

The purpose of this paper is to present “What Should Economists Do?”, an article written by James Buchanan and published in 1964, in an historical perspective. We put forward an important point, namely the opposition with Ludwig von Mises, and Buchanan’s attempt at differentiating his approach from Mises. Instead of in addition to Robbins, that he...

Economics is frequently criticised for relying on a narrow and limited view of human beings. This may be particularly true of economic analyses of non-market decisions in which individuals often appear reduced to self-interested automata who maximise a given objective function. In this article, we show that the approach of one of the founders of pu...

Buchanan believed that individuals are fundamentally willing to cooperate with others. It was at the center of his works in public finance in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and also crucial to his work in public choice in the 1960s. The purpose of this book is to show which forms this belief took over these two decades or so, and to explain the co...

Review of “Milton Friedman. The Last Conservative” by Jennifer Burns.

In a recent article, William Darity, M’Balou Camara, and Nancy MacLean (2023) argue that economist W.H. Hutt was a white supremacist. In the course of their analysis, Darity et al. refer to a claim Hutt made about “exclusive clubs”, that they link to James Buchanan’s article on clubs (1965). As a result, Hutt appears to have been inspired by Buchan...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the methodological foundations of the law and economics movement, with a special emphasis on the role and place of individuals in law and economics. Reviewing the works of the main contributors—the founders, indeed—to the law and economics movement, we show that all of them considered that the analysis of leg...

A history of the transformation of public !nance into public economics necessarily involves an understanding of the tension between positive and normative statements, that is a history of how public economists dealt with Robbins’s requirements that economists should not make normative statements. In this paper, we propose to contribute to this hist...

This symposium is based on a workshop organized (online) on 24–25 February 2021 and sponsored by World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR). In this introduction, we stress the institutional dimension of repugnance, and show how it is dealt with in the papers gathered in the symposium. Kimberly Krawiec analyses repugnance in...

In her ‘Markets, repugnance, and externalities’ (2022), Kimberly Krawiec notes that the so-called corruption theorists fail to provide evidence that the adoption of repugnant behaviours or commodification destroy social values. She adds that, the values repugnant behaviours are supposed to destroy may even be reinforced after a market has been crea...

The Samaritan’s Dilemma has largely been investigated, frequently by assuming that Samaritans help recipients out of altruism. Yet, Buchanan did not make any behavioral assumption regarding the Samaritan’s motives. In this paper, we explicitly introduce this assumption in Buchanan’s original model and analyze how it changes the nature of the game....

Written by James Buchanan in the early 1970s, “The Samaritan's Dilemma” is a pessimistic essay, marked by his author's negative views about the situation in Western societies at that time. Yet, the situation described in this essay also fits into Buchanan’s approach to cooperation and free riding. Put differently, it is perfectly with Buchanan’s vi...

Richard A. Posner was the most important actor in the transformation from “law and economics” to an “economic analysis of law”. Posner applied Chicago price theory to the analysis of law and legal rules. He not only contributed to the field but also structured it. This is what this chapter shows. We also show that Posner’s work illustrates the Chic...

We study a bonus pay setting where a principal hires a supervisor to evaluate a group of potentially shirking workers. The supervisor and her workers develop relational feelings (either positive or negative) after interacting with each other. We analyze a novel class of organizational infractions where the supervisor provides false evaluations of t...

In this paper, we study the impact of altruism on an interaction between a Samaritan and a recipient/parasite in the frame of Buchanan’s Samaritan’s dilemma (1975). We show that, as soon as altruism reaches a certain threshold, the equilibrium of the game corresponds to the situation Buchanan called a Samaritan’s dilemma. We also show that the Nash...

We point out that governance is better viewed as existing along a spectrum of rules rather than as either-or trade-offs in kinds of rules. This means that governance concepts at polar extremes, such as "abstract" and "concrete" orders, though useful heuristic tools for analysis and modeling, are also more properly interpreted as being nuanced in na...

The purpose of this paper is to study the organization of inquiry at two centers that played a crucial role in the creation, emergence and development of the Virginia School of Political Economy (VPE): the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy (University of Virginia) and the Center for the Study of Public C...

James Buchanan wrote “An Economic Theory of Clubs” and invented clubs to support a form of welfare economics in which there is no social welfare function (SWF) and individual utility functions cannot be “read” by external observers. Clubs were a means to allow the implementation of individualized prices for public goods and services and to allow ea...

The purpose of this article is to show that Prices, Income and Public Policy (1954), an introductory textbook in economics written by William Allen, James Buchanan and Marshall Colberg, was actually a treatise in political economy. The book indeed tapped to the political economy of Henry Simons and Frank Knight, and anticipated Virginia Political E...

This brief note introduces readers to the papers published in this issue on the theme of “Alternative Traditions in Public Choice.” While the field of Public Choice is commonly seen to have been born of Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent (1962), the guest editors encouraged submissions to consider alternative influences. Instead, the papers...

Book Review of “The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand: Dogmatic and Pragmatic Views on Free Markets and the State of Economic Theory” by Karl Mittermaier

This paper proffers a dialogical theory of decision-making: decision-makers (DMs) are engaged in two modes of rational decisions, instrumental and existential. Instrumental rational decisions take place when the DM views the self externally to the objects, whether goods or animate beings. Existential rational decisions take place when the DM views...

One of the major challenges that result from the digital transformation occurring in our societies bears on its impact on the organization and regulation of the economy. This leads to a dramatic change to the economic institutions of capitalism—into what could be defined as platform capitalism—that rests on a fundamental dilemma between ‘decentrali...

The purpose of this article analyze the process that led Buchanan to become a ‘Wicksellian’, that is, to recognise the importance of Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen . It is now established that Buchanan discovered Wicksell’s Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen not after he had completed his PhD dissertation – as he himself recounted – but before. W...

Scandals are pervasive in many areas of society. We propose a characterization of scandals that explicitly considers their potential benefits to transgressors. Although scandals are frequently considered to be undesirable to the targets or transgressors implicated, we develop four rationales by which a scandal can actually be beneficial to them. Fi...

The purpose of this paper is to show that, at the very beginning of his career, Buchanan was interested in concrete issues related to the economic situation in the South rather than with abstract and philosophical works in public finance. We examine the published and unpublished articles, reviews and replies that Buchanan wrote between 1949 and 195...

Richard Posner’s “What Do Judges and Justices Maximize?” (1993b) is not, as usually believed, the first analysis of judges’ behaviors made by using the assumption that judges are rational and maximize a utility function. That analysis arrived at the end of a rather long process. This paper recounts the history of this process, from the “birth” of l...

This article presents and discusses “The ‘Politics’ of Economic Policy,” an essay that remains unpublished and that James Buchanan wrote in 1953. In this essay, Buchanan, for the first time, claimed that politicians and bureaucrats are not benevolent despots—it was not an assumption. This helps to understand that Buchanan had abandoned the “romanti...

The category “other-regarding preferences” is a catch-all phrase based on a self/other dichotomy. While the self/other might be useful when the motive is self-interest or altruism, it fails when the motive involves bonding. This article identifies three motives that involve bonding: i) the preferences regarding friendship and community; ii) the pre...

Buchanan's first writings about federalism and fiscal justice were “'Federalism’: One Barrier to Labor Mobility” and “A Theory of Financial Balance in a Federal State,” two term papers that he wrote before his dissertation and that have never been discussed before. Studying them allows us to complete the recent literature on the origins of Buchanan...

Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) has been incredibly influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin focused on the stress population growth inevitably placed on environmental resources. Unconstrained consumption of a shared resource—a pasture, a highway,...

Henry N. Butler and Jonathan Klick, eds., History of Law and Economics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), pp. 880, $425 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781786432988. - Alain Marciano

There exists a distinction between ‘law and economics’ and the ‘economic analysis of law’. The former, corresponding to Coase’s approach, consists in taking legal rules into account insofar as they influence economic activities. The latter, associated to Posner’s name, consists in using economics to analyze legal problems. Methodologically speaking...

James Buchanan’s views on public finance have already been analyzed and they are quite well known, as are their origins and roots. However, nothing has ever been said about why Buchanan chose public finance in the first place. The first goal of this paper is to show that Buchanan had made this choice before arriving at Chicago. We show how Carlton...

This essay reviews Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, which triggered a huge controversy that virally spread on the Internet and in various journals. We will evaluate MacLean's almost biographical account of James Buchanan, which portrays the 1986 Nobel Prize laureate as the master...

We revisit the “Coase theorem” through the lens of a cooperative game model which takes into account the assignment of rights among agents involved in a problem of social cost. We consider the case where one polluter interacts with many potential victims. Given an assignment or a mapping of rights, we represent a social cost problem by a cooperativ...

In the present paper we contribute to the previous literature on de facto enforcing mechanisms, by focusing on the role of judicial institutions and their performance and measurement. We propose both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting the necessity of a clear distinction between two measures of judicial performance, efficiency and effica...

The article provides an overview on the emergence of dispute resolution institutions in society and market, their pivotal role and their impact on the human activities. It introduces then recent researches conducted by a pool of scholars in order to advance the understanding of modern judicial institutions which represent the aims of this journal i...

This essay reviews Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, which triggered a huge controversy that virally spread on the internet and in various journals. We will evaluate MacLean’s almost biographical account of James Buchanan, which portrays the 1986 Nobel Prize laureate as the master...

The purpose of this chapter is to link Ronald Coase's methodological approach to what he 'learned' when he was at the London School of Economics (LSE) from Edwin Cannan and Arnold Plant. The main lesson Coase taught us and insisted upon was that economics should not be too 'abstract' and should not rely on a priori categories. He pleaded for more r...

This paper develops a theory of tasteful and distasteful exchanges based on rational choice. By making reference to existing literature, we first differentiate repugnant from tasteful/distasteful transactions and bring up the additional consideration of the latter. There is a key difference between the two types of proscribed exchanges: repugnancy...

The Coase theorem is associated with Stigler because Stigler coined the term. The object of this paper is to show that Stigler's Coase theorem is Stiglerian for deeper – namely, methodological – reasons. We argue that, convinced as he was by the importance of Coase's message, Stigler also believed that this message – such as presented in " The Fede...

The purpose of this chapter is to link Ronald Coase’s methodological approach to what he ‘learned’ when he was at the London School of Economics (LSE) from Edwin Cannan and Arnold Plant. The main lesson Coase taught us and insisted upon was that economics should not be too ‘abstract’ and should not rely on a priori categories. He pleaded for more r...

The object of this paper is to retrace the steps that led Buchanan from marginal cost pricing to clubs. We claim that the idea individuals could form clubs to finance public goods can be traced back to his first works on public finance, at the end of the 1940s, and relates to the financing of highways and the pricing of their construction and of th...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the connections and links that existed between Buchanan and Italian economists. We show that, even though Buchanan had read them, it was only after having spent one year in Italy—1955–1956—that Buchanan paid attention to these economists. Here, Francesco Forte played a particularly important role. It did not...