This dissertation examines the major causes of the unstable capital accumulation process in the trunk airline industry in the U.S. during the period 1946 to 1975. The study first traces the evolution of the multi-dimensional aspects of airline regulation, the role of existing airlines in shaping the regulation by the Civil Aeronautics Board to suit their interests best, the market relations among airlines, and the growth record of airline operations. What follows is an integrated examination of three factors considered to be primary sources of investment instability: aircraft technology, the airlines' market behavior, and their particular method of financing. The timing, size, and duration of each investment wave were influenced by the adoption of new aircraft technologies and their specific characteristics. Aircraft technologies that induced most of the industry's growth were essentially molded by the U.S. government which generally financed their development and rendered them commercially exploitable. The industry's rigid oligopolistic structure, as was fashioned by its regulator, precluded price competition entirely and elevated the competitive importance of the frequency of flights and of investment in modern flying equipment. Under competitive pressure, airlines usually attempted to acquire competitively superior aircraft simultaneously with little regard to their individual financial positions. The result was cumulative overcapacity, production inefficiencies, and recurring financial crises. Formal cartel agreements in the industry were effective in reducing waste. The airlines relied heavily on long-term debt and capital leases to finance investment. These funds were provided by a relatively few very large life insurance companies and commercial banks which were also holders of large blocks of airline stock. The extensive use of debt funds and the power of the large financial institutions involved alternatively accelerated and stifled capital formation in the industry. The dissertation concludes that the conditions that produced the boom-bust cycles in airline investment reduced the industry from a growth sector to a stagnant sector of the U.S. economy.

This dissertation consists of a model of the monetary policy process, and an application of the model to the post-World War I financial and macroeconomic policy system. Orthodox money multiplier models mis-specify the transmission mechanism of the monetary policy. An alternative model is constructed from the micro-foundations of the credit supply process. The model locates the transmission channel of monetary policy in the impact of policy initiatives on the expectations of portfolio holders in the financial markets. If monetary policy initiatives have a negligible impact on expectations, they will not have a significant impact on the course of real economic activity in a capitalist economy with sophisticated financial markets and more than nominal business cycles. The expectations formation process is analyzed to derive the institutional configuration and policy stance that contribute to a tight connection between monetary policy initiatives and the expected profitability of credit creation. The analysis concludes that monetary policy, while potentially powerful, is an inherently unstable platform for macroeconomic control. The monetary authority's control of expectations can fluctuate dramatically in a short space of time. If the monetary authority is viewed as technically weak vis a vis market forces or politically vulnerable to competing macroeconomic policy centers, it will face rapid and severe declines in monetary policy effectiveness. The motivation for the construction of the postwar financial order was a great fear by the elites of the social and political consequences of modest amounts of inflation. The central bank was elevated to the status of a macroecomonic planner, and given the task of keeping the economy inflation free, and provided with a monopoly on macroeconomic policy. An asymmetrical, pro-cyclical policy stance promised to cap booms and promote "liquidations," that is, to enforce a severe recession following an expansion. Robust central bank independence protected unpopular policies. The system was effective, but chronically inflexible, being deliberately designed to be inhospitable to expansionary policy, and incapable of conforming to policy pressures from the electorate. During 1929 - 1933 the system worked as design, and paralyzed expansionary macroeconomic policy initiatives. The disastrous results discredited the system and its supporters.

For many social theorists, the word 'class' has and continues to play a privileged role in the analyses of human societies. There is no consensus as to what the word should mean--and the debates rage on. However, on one score there is an extraordinary implicit consensus. Whatever the word actually means, almost all analysts claim that the determinants they have choosen stand in a special causal relationship to the non-class aspects of society. This dissertation is conceived as a critical examination of these two basic unsettled areas within social theories. One additional issue is of great concern to this dissertation. We will argue that the different meanings of the word 'class' and the causal privilege assigned to it are not mere semantic disputes. They are also disputes about the desirability of existing social structures and the possibility of new ones. We define and identify three broad traditions within theoretical approaches to analysing human societies: a class tradition, a non-class tradition, and a composite tradition that combines elements from the first two. This thesis uses a particular reading of Marx's work to analyse some representative contemporary efforts that attempt to settle the arguments over what class should mean and how its privileged status should be understood. We have choosen major texts that have appeared in the last thirty years by four important social theorists who have devoted significant analytical attention to the problems of class and causation. Key texts by Ralf Dahrendorf, Anthony Giddens, Nicos Poulantzas, and Eric Olin Wright are critically examined. The first two authors are influential representatives from the non-class tradition, and the latter two are from the composite tradition. Based on a particular non-essentialist Marxist class theoretic perspective this dissertation demonstrates the superiority of our approach vis-a-vis the alternative texts. We spell out the advantages both for analyses of contemporary societies and the strategic political advantages of employing our approach. It is in these senses that the alternative texts are considered to be seriously flawed in their respective attempts to solve these two basic problem areas in social theory today.

Attempting to square the concrete realities of post-revolutionary Soviet Union and China with their various notions of communism, participants in the Marxist theoretical tradition have found themselves engaged in polemics contending the definitions of socialism and communism, as well as the basis for their development. The absence of consensus within the Marxian tradition has resolved into a confusing disarray of dogmatic confrontations wherein the proponents of the various schools of thought claim that their respective theories, in comparison to others, have captured (epistemological essentialism) the true essence of social development (ontological essentialism). Rejecting the empiricist and rationalist epistemological bases of these confrontations, this dissertation posits an 'Althussarian' notion of overdetermination as an alternative basis with which to critically evaluate the constitutive logic of the contending discourses utilized in attempting to analyze social formations which have experienced 'socialist' revolutions. We define three broad traditional theoretical approaches to these issues: economism, humanism, and overdetermination. Rejecting an apodictic posture toward these contending approaches, this dissertation presents a thorough reading of the works of Marx and Engels in demonstration of the exegetical basis of contending discourses. A discussion of J. V. Stalin's writings is presented as an example of one of the predominant forms of essentialist logic. Charles Bettelheim's works are analyzed and compared to Stalin's. Both Stalin's and Bettelheim's approaches to questions of socialism and communism are found to reduce social development to ahistorical essential characteristics. Their respective strategies for communist development are thereby reduced to propounding those characteristics proclaimed as essences. Rejecting such reductionist analyses, this dissertation concludes in presentation of the type of analytical fruits that might obtain when approaching these issues within the framework of the tradition demarcated by the notion of a conjuncturally overdetermined communist fundamental class process and its conditions of existence.

This dissertation consists of three essays studying economic agents with non-standard reactions to information. The standard model is often inadequate because it permits neither inattention nor ambiguity aversion. This dissertation provides both pure and applied theoretical analyses of these two phenomena. The first essay models an agent who has a limited capacity to pay attention to information and thus conditions her actions on a coarsening of the available information. An optimally inattentive agent chooses both her coarsening and her actions by constrained maximization of an underlying subjective expected utility preference relation. The main result axiomatically characterizes the conditional choices of actions by an agent that are necessary and sufficient for her behavior to be seen as if it is the result of optimal inattention. The agent's utility index, cognitive constraint and prior are uniquely identified. The second essay analyzes the implications of advertising in a model where consumers are optimally inattentive. Firms compete by choosing both prices and advertising levels. Consumers easily observe price but have a limited capacity to pay attention to information about quality. Advertisements increase consumer capacity for attention. An increase in capacity for attention results in more information processed by each consumer, which raises the likelihood that a high quality good is purchased but leads to an increased price. An exogenous decrease in the cost of advertising has a positive impact on equilibrium price but an ambiguous effect on equilibrium profit and surplus. Advertising generates some effects documented in the literature through a single mechanism. The third essay studies strategic voting when voters have pure common values but exhibit Ellsberg-type behavior as modeled by maxmin expected utility preferences. The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that given subjective expected utility maximization and common values, the equilibrium probability that the correct candidate wins goes to one as the size of the electorate goes to infinity. In contrast, this essay provides sufficient conditions so that the equilibrium probability of the correct candidate winning the election is bounded above by one half in at least one state. As a consequence, there is no equilibrium in which information aggregates.

This dissertation presents a Marxian class analytic theory of economic reproduction and growth. The approach developed herein uses social accounting matrices and a simple two-sector growth model to extend the conventional boundary of class theory from the individual site to a group of heterogeneous sites exchanging commodities and money. The growth model is based on Marx's theory of reproduction, which serves as a baseline, but also introduces unproductive labor, distribution among multiple competing groups, technological change, and changes in the rate of exploitation. Several simulations examine the potential effects of these issues on different groups within an aggregate class structure. This aggregate class structure approach is contrasted with other Marxian theories of social development and change, mode of production and social formation theory in particular. The origin and development of the mode of production and social formation approach to social theory is extensively surveyed and critiqued. Particular attention is paid to the social ontology underpinning this approach and to the relationship between this approach and Hegel's philosophy of history. A significant finding of this dissertation is that while the mode of production and social formation approach to social theory attributes a deterministic role to the economy, class analytic Marxian economic theory finds no support for this thesis and instead indicates that economic and non-economic factors reciprocally condition, and indeed constitute, one another.

This dissertation investigates whether or not there is a clear break between neoclassical economics (up to the 1970s) and the contemporary mainstream economic approaches. The term “contemporary mainstream economic approaches” refers to a seemingly heterogeneous set of approaches that include, among others, new institutional economics, new information economics, social choice theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary game theory, and experimental economics. In this dissertation, in contrast to those who declare the “death of neoclassical economics” and find a clear break (i.e., rupture, paradigm shift) between neoclassical economics and the number of contemporary mainstream approaches listed above, I conclude that these seemingly disparate approaches constitute a unified discursive formation articulated around the theoretical problematic of theoretical humanism that they share not only with one another but also with neoclassical economics. For this reason, in order to underscore the philosophico-theoretical as well as the historico-genealogical continuity between neoclassical economics (up to the 1970s) and the contemporary mainstream economic approaches, I shall refer to the latter as late neoclassical economics. In the late neoclassical context, neither the essentialist notions of human subject that involve self-transparency, autonomy, rationality, and intentional agency nor the ontologies of concordance, harmony, order and equilibrium are thoroughly scrutinized. On the contrary, the late neoclassical context is characterized by a concerted and multipronged effort to extend the scope of application of these notions and ontologies either by way of broadening and enriching their meanings or by way of introducing newer concepts that formulate the problem in slightly different ways (e.g., static versus dynamic, general versus partial, price-adjustment versus market-adjustment, cooperative versus non-cooperative) that would not necessarily address, but essentially sidestep, the problems that trouble the earlier formulations. In fact, in this sense, the contemporary mainstream economics is nothing but the shape that neoclassical economics has taken as a mature and developed theoretical tradition.

This dissertation consists of two essays in Game Theory with Incomplete Information. The common theme of the essays pertains to the interpretation and origin of incomplete information in strategic situations. In the first essay, I study bargaining between a buyer and a seller when the buyer can invest in generating outside options at a cost, and the seller cannot observe his investment choice. I model the negotiation phase as an incentive compatible and ex-post individually rational direct mechanism, which maximizes a weighted average of the buyer's and seller's expected payoff. When the weight on the buyer is larger, trade happens with certainty, the price equals the seller’s cost, and the buyer does not invest in generating outside options. When the weight on the seller is larger, the optimal mechanism is a posted price mechanism at the worst outside option that the buyer could have, provided that the cost function of the buyer is decreasing in first order stochastic dominance. The probability of trade is strictly below 1, even if it would be socially efficient to trade. In the second essay, I propose a notion of Rationalizability, called Incomplete Preference Rationalizability, for games with incomplete preferences. Under an appropriate topological condition, the incomplete preference rationalizable set is non-empty and compact. I argue that incomplete orderings can be used to model incomplete information in strategic settings. Drawing on this connection, I show that in games with private values the sets of incomplete preference rationalizable actions, of belief-free rationalizable actions (Battigalli et al., 2011, Bergemann and Morris, 2017), and of interim correlated rationalizable actions (Dekel et al., 2007) of the universal type space coincide.

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Ecofeminists argue that Western Humanist culture defines Woman and Nature as the Other of Man. Thus, Woman and Nature are treated as objects, to be used at the behest of Man. This dissertation uses an anti-essentialist, Ecofeminist approach to examine the history of the relationship between humans and the earth within Neoclassical economic theory. In particular, the entry points of Neoclassical theory--preferences, resources, and technology--as well as its logic reflect the Western Humanist assumption that Man is the rational and rightful master of Nature. Neoclassical theory culminates in an elaborate defense of the Market, the ultimate symbol of Man's mastery of Nature. This claim to mastery begins to unravel, however, with the concept of externalities, which allows for the possibility that Nature may not be entirely "mastered." The dissertation uses this post-modern moment in Neoclassical theory to argue against Neoclassical claims of market efficiency and to argue for a different approach to the relationship between humans and the earth. This work concludes by exploring the possibility of an Ecofeminist approach to economics, an approach that would eschew the mastery fetish omnipresent in Neoclassical theory.