Some of the papers discuss the particular institutional problems of the economic transition in the post-socialist countries--and more general questions of economic development.
The Human-Capital-ist Firm: An Approach from Property Theory and Democratic Theory.
"Economic" theories of the firm base the design of firms on cost minimization. Yet the scope of cost minimization is restricted to a constraint set of "permitted" institutional forms which would rule out certain possibilities such as the voluntary sale of human capital (the self-sale contract). This paper presents an array of rights-based arguments that the constraint set should be further restricted to exclude the self-rental or employment contract. The rights arguments come from two general sources: the standard principle of responsibility in jurisprudence ("Assign legal responsibility in accordance with de facto responsibility") and democratic theory ("People should be democratically self-determining in all spheres of human life--not just the 'public' sphere"). These theories descend from the Reformation and Enlightenment, and the theories include an inalienable rights argument to defeat voluntary contractual violations of the principles such as the self-sale contract and the Hobbesian pact of subjugation. The key intuition of the inalienable rights theory is that one cannot in fact voluntarily "transfer" responsibility for one's actions to another person (i.e., can only voluntarily co-operate with another person) and cannot voluntarily "transfer" decision-making to another (i.e., can only voluntarily make one's decision in accordance with the decision of another). Yet this old critique of the self-sale contract and Hobbesian pact also applies to the short-term self-rental contract and the Hobbesian pact in the workplace, the employment contract. If the constraint set is reduced by eliminating the employment contract then the range of feasible designs for the firm would all involve labor hiring capital with the human capitalists being the residual claimants, i.e., they would all be various forms of the human-capital-ist firm.
Insider Sovereignty and Corporate Governance in the Japanese Company.
This paper presents the developing theory of the large Japanese company (J-firm) as essentially a labor-managed firm. Throughout the contrast is drawn between the J-firm and the "standard model" of the shareholder-oriented "Anglo-American" joint stock company
(AA-firm). Both models are presented in a simplified and idealized form in order to sharpen and clarify the contrast.
Parallel Addition, Series-Parallel Duality, and Financial Mathematics.
This essay develops the notion of parallel addition that is dual to ordinary (series) addition. These operations are represented by the parallel or series addition of resistors in electrical circuits. A number of applications of series-parallel duality are developed outside of electrical circuit theory. The most interesting new application is financial arithmetic where each equation has a dual equation. Series-parallel duality is shown to be related to convex duality as a derivative of a function is related to the original function.
Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life: Essays in Philosophy, Economics, and Mathematics.
Dramatic changes or revolutions in a field of science are often made by outsiders or "trespassers" who are not beholden to the established habits of thought in the field. Each essay in this diverse collection shows the fruits of intellectual trespassing and poaching between fields such as theory of property, Kantian ethics, history of slavery thought, marginal productivity theory, double-entry bookkeeping, philosophy of mind and machines, category theory, concrete universals, proportional representation, arbitrage, algebraic logic, and series-parallel duality in finance.