Economists assume that people make choices based on their preferences and their budget constraints. The preferences and values of others play no role in the standard economic model. This feature has been sharply criticized by other social scientists, who believe that the choices people make are also conditioned by social and cultural forces. Economists, meanwhile, are not satisfied with standard sociological and anthropological concepts and explanations because they are not embedded in a testable, analytic framework.
 In this book, Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy provide such a framework by including the social environment along with standard goods and services in their utility functions. These extended utility functions provide a way of analyzing how changes in the social environment affect people's choices and behaviors. More important, they also provide a way of analyzing how the social environment itself is determined by the interactions of individuals.
 Using this approach, the authors are able to explain many puzzling phenomena, including patterns of drug use, how love affects marriage patterns, neighborhood segregation, the prices of fine art and other collectibles, the social side of trademarks, the rise and fall of fads and fashions, and the distribution of income and status.

Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment

Business & Money

Becker, Gary S.

Murphy, Kevin M.

Economics

Belknap Press

Japanese Law in Context: Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

This is a wide-ranging selection of 130 readings in Japanese law. The essays, extracted from previously published books and articles, cover subjects including historical context, the civil law tradition, the legal services industry, dispute resolution, constitutional law, contracts, torts, criminal law, family law, employment law, corporate law, and economic regulation. This unique collection of readings is accompanied by the texts of the Japanese constitution and other basic laws.

Computers & Technology

West, Mark D.

Hendry, Joy

THOMPSON, Mark

Johnson, Chalmers

Young, Leslie

Fallows, James

Shapiro, Martin

Chira, Susan

Van Wolferen, Karel

BOK, DEREK

Merryman, John Henry

McCubbins, Mathew D.

Bayley, David H.

Weingast, Barry R.

Field, Norma

Bernstein, Lisa

Magee, Stephen P.

Brock, William A.

Dubro, Alec

Roe, Mark J.

Nakazato, Minoru

Shleifer, Andrei

Lohr, Steve

Rohlen, Thomas P.

Vishny, Robert W.

Pascale, Richard

Noble, Gregory W.

Upham, Frank K.

Bryant, Taimie L.

Krauss, Ellis S.

Smith, Thomas C.

Kidder, Robert L.

Crabb, Kelly

Miyazawa, Setsuo

Foote, Daniel H.

Miller, Geoffrey P.

Fukao, Mitsuhiro

Muramatsu, Michio

Smith, Robert Eliot

Eng, Robert Y.

Gilson, Ronald J.

Abegglen, James

Abowd, John M.

Amaya, Naohiro

Ames, Walter

Asanuma, Banri

Calvert, Randall L.

Coleman, Samuel

Edwards, Linda N.

Fukushima, Glen S.

Haley, John O.

Hamilton, Constance

Heftel, Chris

Henderson, Dan Fenno

Kaplan, David S.

Kaplan, Steven N.

Kawashima, Takeyosi

Minton, Bernadette A.

Moran, Mark J.

Muto, Shunko

Notehelfer, F. G.

Olson Jr., Mancur

Parkinson, Lorraine

Sheard, Paul

Sklar, Deborah

Smith, Malcolm D. H.

Stalk Jr, George

Takasugi, Shingo

Tanaka, Hideo

Weinstein, David E.

Wiswell, Ella

Yokoyama, Minoru

Yonemoto, Kazuhiro

Zaloom, E. Anthony

Software

Harvard University Asia Center

An authoritative textbook based on the legendary economics course taught at the University of Chicago
Price theory is a powerful analytical toolkit for measuring, explaining, and predicting human behavior in the marketplace. This incisive textbook provides an essential introduction to the subject, offering a diverse array of practical methods that empower students to learn by doing. Based on Economics 301, the legendary PhD course taught at the University of Chicago, the book emphasizes the importance of applying price theory in order to master its concepts.
Chicago Price Theory features immersive chapter-length examples such as addictive goods, urban-property pricing, the consequences of prohibition, the value of a statistical life, and occupational choice. It looks at human behavior in the aggregate of an industry, region, or demographic group, but also provides models of individuals when they offer insights about the aggregate. The book explains the surprising answers that price theory can provide to practical questions about taxation, education, the housing market, government subsidies, and much more. 
<ul>
<li>Emphasizes the application of price theory, enabling students to learn by doing 
</li>
<li>Features chapter-length examples such as addictive goods, urban-property pricing, the consequences of prohibition, and the value of a statistical life 
</li>
<li>Supported by video lectures taught by Kevin M. Murphy and Gary Becker 
</li>
<li>The video course enables students to learn the theory at home and practice the applications in the classroom 
</li>
</ul>

Chicago Price Theory

Minton, Robert

Jaffe, Sonia

Mulligan, Casey B.

Princeton University Press

This volume chronicles the development of printmaking in America through the first half of the twentieth century. During this period of dramatic social and cultural change, printmaking served artists as a cost-effective means of communicating their observations and ideas. Woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs—many illustrated here—by artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, and Grant Wood addressed a variety of themes, including urbanization, small-town life, the Great Depression, the California landscape, and the two World Wars. The skyscraper, for instance, became a prime subject, admired for its roots in American architecture as well as its associations with national power. Prints frequently portrayed the city's inhabitants, often in crowded spaces where the distinctions between public and private life might become uncomfortably blurred. Depictions of the Depression of the 1930s suggest pessimism about the prospects for social justice in a capitalistic economy. Other prints demonstrate a heroic conception of industry and an idealized view of life in the nation's agrarian heartland.

Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950

Arts & Photography

Smith, Jessica Todd

History & Criticism

Huntington Library Press

In Taxing Visions, Leo Mazow and Kevin Murphy explore taxes, rents, economic depression, and financial inequity as subject matter in several visually provocative paintings and works on paper. Although this period is often identified artistically with leisure-laden impressionist landscapes, flowing-with-abundance still-life paintings, and class-conscious “official” portraits, practitioners working in a variety of stylistic idioms reckoned with financial panics and occupational turmoil that marked the Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and early Progressive eras. These paintings, drawings, and prints demonstrate with sometimes startling clarity the experience of economic downturn, ultimately picking up where facts, figures, and the printed word leave off.Featured artists include William Michael Harnett, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as several lesser-known individuals, in part because their art “taxes” our sensibilities of socioeconomic propriety. Taxing Visions shows satire and protest playing out through a sizable body of work, with artists confronting recession and depression with equal parts reportage, invective, humor, and hope. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University and the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino, California.

Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art

Mazow, Leo G.

Penn State University Press

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