The Governance Gauge: Information, Incentives, and The Economics of Control

We hope you’re enjoying your Sunday, and hope that this weekend’s Governance Gauge will get you ready for the coming week! For more reading materials, our reading list is constantly updated.

“Information, Incentives, and the Economics of Control” is a 2005 release from the Cambridge University press, and predominantly examines the issues of voluntary contract as a way of conducting economic activity, as opposed to a centrally-planned economy or a fully tactless laissez-faire system. The writing of the book has some tones of disregard toward Austrian and Keynesian schools alike, but delivers efficient arguments in any regard.

The book is split into 12 chapters. In sequence, they regard: preferences & axioms, feedback control, externalities, control process application, second-best solutions, product choice, pareto improvements, and risk sharing.

Creators of zones and societies will find chapters 5, 6 and 7 useful as they are quite literally instructions in the implementation of specific economic solutions to problems of externalities.

Policymakers and analysts can take a look at chapters 2 and 9, but there is very little to keep the policymaker interested in the book, as almost no legislative examination is given to any of the problems.

Scholars and experts might appreciate chapters 8, 10 and 12 in which some rather obscure pieces of economic insight that can be extremely useful in the examination of unorthodox economic and production systems.

The book can be purchased here.