Poor alchian

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Armen Albert Alchian (born April 12, 1914 in Fresno , California - † February 19, 2013 ) was an American economist at the University of California, Los Angeles .

Live and act

Armen Albert Alchian was born into an Armenian- American family. He studied economics and statistics at the Universities of Fresno and Stanford , and received his doctorate in 1944 under Wilson Allen Wallis . From 1942 to 1946 he worked as a statistician in the US Army . From 1946 he taught at UCLA, from 1947 to 1962 he also worked for the RAND Corporation .

His main interest was the cost function . In Costs and Outputs (1959) he comes to the conclusion that a faster rate of production leads to higher unit costs because it is accompanied by a falling rate of profit .

Alchian advocated the use of statistical data to prove hypotheses. He argued against the prevailing view that inflation leads to price increases, but not to wage increases at the same time. He showed that inflation affects wages, which means that price increases do not benefit companies, at the expense of employees.

In his work he comes to the conclusion that the markets ultimately reward efficient behavior; Profit-maximizing companies flourish while inefficient companies perish. According to Alchian, private ownership leads to higher risk-taking and efficiency, while collective ownership tends to lead to inefficiency. In the 1970s he also worked on organizational theory and employment . In 1978 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Alchian influenced, among other economists, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, William F. Sharpe .

Publications

  • 1950: Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory
  • 1959: Costs and Outputs
  • 1969: Information Costs, Pricing and Resource Unemployment
  • 1972: (together with Harold Demsetz) Production, Information costs and Economic Organization
  • 1978: (with Robert Crawford and Benjamin Klein) Vertical Integration, Appropriable Rents, and the Competitive Contracting Process
  • 1978: Economic Forces at Work
  • 1983: Exchange and Production
  • 1993: Property Rights .

literature

  • David R. Henderson: An Economist Who Made the Science Less Dismal. In: The Wall Street Journal . February 20, 2013, p. A15

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Philip Mirowski: Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 318.
  2. ↑ http://www.bridica.com/EBchecked/topic/1085388/Armen-A-Alchian
personal data
SURNAME Alchian, poor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Alchian, Armen Albert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Fresno , California
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 2013