Robert Leonard

Reading Cournot, Reading Nash: The Creation and Stabilisation of the Nash Equilibrium

The concept of the Cournot-Nash equilibrium is central to noncooperative game theory and the latters use in macroeconomic theory. This paper considers the creation of this theoretical construct, examining the separate contributions of both Cournot and Nash, and showing how the two were ultimately joined together in the eyes of contemporary economic theorists. Rather than simply showing how Cournot served as a precursor to Nash, the author challenges the traditional approach and emphasizes the shifts in interpretation of their respective contributions. In so doing, he addresses some pertinent questions about the manner in which economic theorists view the evolution of their own discipline. Copyright 1994 by Royal Economic Society.

Ethics and the Excluded Middle: Karl Menger and Social Science in Interwar Vienna

For over a decade, before he fled to the United States in 1937, the Viennese mathematician Karl Menger (1902-1985) was both a participant in the discussions of the Vienna Circle, with Hahn, Schlick, Neurath, and Carnap, and an important presence in Viennese social scientific circles. His writings span pure mathematics, the philosophy of mathematics, ethics, and economics, and his work on the last two marked a turn toward abstraction in social theory at a time when mathematical modeling was foreign to most social scientists. Read by economists in Vienna and abroad, Menger was particularly influential in Morgensterns contribution to the development of game theory with John von Neumann at Princeton during World War II. Drawing on both new and established archival material, this essay illustrates Mengers contribution to social science, placing particular emphasis on the complex manner in which it was shaped by both his participation in the debates on the foundations of mathematics and his personal reaction to the convolutions of Viennese politics. This account of Menger shows how, on the eve of Hitlers arrival in Vienna, social scientific, mathematical, and political debates there were deeply intertwined.

The Collapse of Interwar Vienna: Oskar Morgenstern's Community, 1925–50

From the perspective of science, art and intellectual life in general, Interwar Vienna was one of the most vibrant communities in modern European history. Within the field of economics, it was home to, amongst others, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Hans Mayer, Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Karl Menger and Abraham Wald. The community flourished after the end of World War I, and then began to suffer in the early 1930’s as a result of growing political instability and rising anti-semitism. With the Anschluss of Austria by the Third Reich in March 1938, it collapsed completely, never to recover. Drawing on the personal papers of two key participants, Oskar Morgenstern and Karl Menger, and also on the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, this paper provides a portrait of that community, chronicling its evolution and dramatic collapse. Particular attention is paid to the milieu surrounding Morgenstern, both as director of the Rockefeller-funded Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research and as philosophical “dissident”. In collaborating with mathematicians Menger, Wald and, later, John von Neumann, he gradually forsook his Austrian theoretical legacy. The account detailed here shows conflict and tension to have been central to both the life and death of this fabled community.

The experiment in the history of economics

List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Experimental Economic Games 2. The Allais Paradox and its Immediate Consequences For Expected Utility Theory 3. Experimentation, General Equilibrium and Games 4. Thought - and Performed Experiments in Hayek and Morgenstern 5. Social Comptabilism and Pure Credit Systems 6. The Vanity of Rigour in Economics

Commentary on Menger’s Work on Sociology

In mid-July 1937, in Colorado Springs, in surroundings not dissimilar to the Alps he had left behind, Karl Menger presented to a Cowles Commission conference a preliminary version of the first of the following papers. To the audience of economists and statisticians, he admitted that his work stood in contrast to the papers they had presented over the course of the previous fortnight: “The sociological theory presented in this paper is related to the research of econometricians not in its results but in its spirit. The spirit of many other sociological theories is very different” (1937, pp. 71-72).