Adam Smith and the welfare cost of optimism.

The writer explores the welfare losses identified by Adam Smith as occurring because competition allocates resources to the highest bidders, whose expectations usually have an optimistic bias. He generalizes Smith's thesis on interest ceilings to a plan for resource allocation, and he examines 20th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:History of Political Economy Vol. 29; pp. 185 - 201
Main Author: Niehans, Jürg
Format: Article
Published: Duke University Press Summer 1997
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost