A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Offering a unifying theoretical perspective not readily available in any other text, this innovative guide to econometrics uses simple geometrical arguments to develop students' intuitive understanding of basic and advanced topics, emphasizing throughout the practical applications of modern theory and nonlinear techniques of estimation. One theme of the text is the use of artificial regressions for estimation, reference, and specification testing of nonlinear models, including diagnostic tests for parameter constancy, serial correlation, heteroscedasticity, and other types of mis-specification. Explaining how estimates can be obtained and tests can be carried out, the authors go beyond a mere algebraic description to one that can be easily translated into the commands of a standard econometric software package. Covering an unprecedented range of problems with a consistent emphasis on those that arise in applied work, this accessible and coherent guide to the most vital topics in econometrics today is indispensable for advanced students of econometrics and students of statistics interested in regression and related topics. It will also suit practising econometricians who want to update their skills. Flexibly designed to accommodate a variety of course levels, it offers both complete coverage of the basic material and separate chapters on areas of specialized interest.

Estimation and Inference in Econometrics

The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

This 1966 paperback edition of a publication which first appeared in 1963 has by now been widely reviewed as a worthy contribution to the sociological study of deviant behavior. Its current appearance as a paperback is a testimonial both to the quality of the work and to the prominence of deviant behavior in this generation. In general the author places deviance in perspective, identifies types of deviant behavior, considers the role of rule makers and enforcers, and some of the problems in studying deviance. In addition, he develops a sequential model of deviance relying on the concept of career, a concept originally developed in studies of occupations. In his study of a particular kind of deviance, the use of marihuana, the author posits and tests systematically an hypothesis about the genesis of marihuana use for pleasure. The hypothesis traces the sequence of changes in individual attitude

Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.

Online feedback mechanisms harness the bidirectional communication capabilities of the Internet to engineer large-scale, word-of-mouth networks. Best known so far as a technology for building trust and fostering cooperation in online marketplaces, such as eBay, these mechanisms are poised to have a much wider impact on organizations. Their growing popularity has potentially important implications for a wide range of management activities such as brand building, customer acquisition and retention, product development, and quality assurance. This paper surveys our progress in understanding the new possibilities and challenges that these mechanisms represent. It discusses some important dimensions in which Internet-based feedback mechanisms differ from traditional word-of-mouth networks and surveys the most important issues related to their design, evaluation, and use. It provides an overview of relevant work in game theory and economics on the topic of reputation. It discusses how this body of work is being extended and combined with insights from computer science, management science, sociology, and psychology to take into consideration the special properties of online environments. Finally, it identifies opportunities that this new area presents for operations research/management science (OR/MS) research.

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The Digitization of Word of Mouth: Promise and Challenges of Online Feedback Mechanisms

Jeremy Bentham contended that property and state-made law "are born and must die together. Before the [state's] law there was no property: take away the law, all property ceases" [4,309]. Most economists have taken this argument to heart. Clearly, some system of defining and then protecting and enforcing property rights (property law) and rules of exchange (contract law) is needed for a market system to develop. But does the state have to develop and enforce property and contract law? One purpose of the following presentation is to demonstrate that the commercial sector is completely capable of establishing and enforcing its own laws. A second purpose is to illustrate that modern commercial law is, in fact, largely made by the merchant community despite governmental efforts to take over provision of such law. Commerce is an evolving process of interaction and reciprocity which is simultaneously facilitated by and leads to an evolving system of commercial law. Carl Menger [17] proposed that the origin, formulation and the ultimate process of all social institutions including law is essentially the same as the "spontaneous order" Adam Smith [20] described for markets. Markets guided by Smith's invisible hand coordinate interactions, and so does customary law [6; 7]. These systems develop because, perhaps through a process of trial and error, it is found that the actions they are intended to coordinate are performed more effectively under one institutional arrangement or process than under another. The more effective institutions and practices replace the less effective. In the case of customary commercial law, traditions and practice evolve to produce the observed spontaneous order. As Hayek explained, however, while Smith's and Menger's insights are firmly established in economics, the study of jurisprudence has been almost completely unaffected by their arguments [9, 101]. One reason, of course, is that the invisible hand explanation for the emergence of market order is highly plausible because there is an obvious mechanism-the mechanics of individual but interrelated market prices-which provides the necessary coordination we call the price system. The mechanism of evolution for a legal order is much less obvious. Thus, the legal positivist view, which holds that law is the product of deliberate design, has a strong following among economists. Another major purpose of this discussion of commercial law, therefore, is to demonstrate that the rules of property and contract necessary for a market economy, which most economists and legal scholars feel must be "imposed," have evolved without the

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The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law

The enterprise of law : justice without the state

Studies of spatial market integration draw their implications from a theory which assumes that there are no intraregional transport costs. An alternative theory is offered, based on the assumptions that buyers and sellers are spatially dispersed and intraregional transport costs are significant. This implies that the market is a linked oligopoly (or oligopsony) and that market integration tests are tests of alternative oligopoly price formation processes. For example, collusive basing-point pricing produces results typically assumed to imply efficiently integrated markets, while competitive FOB pricing does not. The theoretical implications are illustrated with an analysis of hog prices in Canada.

Integration of Spatial Markets

The relationships among drug offenses, prorperty crime, and the allocation of police resources are investigated in a structural model using data from Florida countries. Law enforcement resources are scarce, and as efforts to combat drug crime increase the amount of these resources allocated to property crime is reduced. This reallocation of police resources results in reduced deterrence for property crime and, as a result, an increase in these crimes. The evidence presented suggests that rising property crimes in Florida are at least partially the result of drug enforcement policy.

Is property crime caused by drug use or by drug enforcement policy

After 1984 local law enforcement agences in the U.S. substantially increased arrests for drug offenses relative to arrests for property and violent crimes. This paper explores why this reallocation of police resources occurred, focusing on alternative “public interest” and bureaucratic self interest explanations. The Comprehensive Crime Act of 1984 is shown to have altered the incentives of police agencies by allowing them to keep the proceeds of assets forfeited as a result of drug enforcement activities. Empirical evidence is presented which shows that police agencies can increase their discretionary budgets through the asset forfeiture process.

Bruce L. Benson

Papers

The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law

The enterprise of law : justice without the state

Integration of Spatial Markets

Is property crime caused by drug use or by drug enforcement policy

Police bureaucracies, their incentives, and the war on drugs