Lectures In The Microeconomics Of Choice: Foundations, Consumers, And Producers (World Scientific Lecture Notes In Economics And Policy)

People pursue their own interests, whatever those interests might be. Some people have interests that are narrow and selfish, while others have interests that are broad and altruistic. The idea that people are self-interested underpins all of economic analysis and raises two fundamental questions: 1. How do people choose the actions they think will further their own interests? 2. Can the potentially conflicting interests of different people be made to 'mesh' in some sort of socio-economic equilibrium? This book is devoted to a detailed study of the first question. Its Companion Volume (Economy-Wide Microeconomics: Equilibrium, Optimality, Applications and Tests) makes a detailed study of the second question.

Following some foundational remarks, this book studies the Arrow-Debreu theory of consumer choice. That theory supposes people choose so as to maximize a complete, continuous, transitive, and reflexive binary preference relation over a non-empty and compact choice set. The book then studies numerous refinements, generalizations and extensions of each of these restrictions - up to and including recent work on Behavioral theories of choice and choice behaviour when preferences are intransitive/incomplete/discontinuous. Also considered is choice behaviour in environments that are not necessarily compact. A study is also made of intertemporal choice and choice under uncertainty. The study of Arrow-Debreu choice theory and its extensions are presented from the Primal, Dual, and Revealed Preference points of view.

Consumers are not the only agents in the economy, as Producers are present as well. Beginning with a study of the Arrow-Debreu idea that producers choose from a convex production set so as to maximize profit, the book considers extensions and generalizations of this framework, particularly to non-convex environments. The study is presented from the Primal and Dual points of view.

The final chapter in the book provides a link to its Companion Volume. The Chapter indicates how the theories of consumer and producer choice studied here help inform answers of the second question posed above.

William David Anthony (Tony) Bryant is an Honorary Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Macquarie University. He holds degrees from the Australian National University and the University of Western Sydney, and after a short period working in the Commonwealth Department of Minerals and Energy in Canberra, he moved into academia, where he has worked happily ever since. He has had visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Cambridge University, XLRI, and Sydney University, among other places. His main research interests are in Microeconomics, General Equilibrium Theory, and game theory.

Professor Bryant has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and research reports in Microeconomics, General Equilibrium Theory, and related areas, including a recently edited volume titled Computable General Equilibrium Models (World Scientific) and a review of Economy Wide Modelling of Water in CGE Models (Oxford University Press). Recently, in a joint work with Edwin Franks, he has discovered, and published in Economics Letters, an interesting set of new necessary and sufficient conditions under which the Law of Demand holds. This work is part of an extensive and ongoing research program aimed at understanding the foundations of General Equilibrium Theory.

Professor Bryant's book, General Equilibrium: Theory and Evidence (World Scientific, 2010), was very favorably reviewed in Zentralblatt MATH, has been influential with research workers, and is highly cited in the literature. This monograph contains a careful and extended investigation of the foundations of general equilibrium. It turns up surprising and compelling conclusions about conditions necessary for general equilibrium.

Professor Bryant's teaching ― particularly of advanced undergraduate and graduate students ― regularly receives high praise for its breadth, clarity, rigor, and its ability to educate and deeply inform.