Books by Kenneth J. Arrow

The third volume of Arrow's Collected Papers concerns the basic concept of rationality as it applies to an economic decision maker. In particular, it addresses the problem of choice faced by consumers in a multicommodity world and presents specific models of choice useful in economic analysis. It also discusses choice models under uncertainty.

Arrow takes up the basic question of whether collective choices can reflect individual preferences. The seminal 1950 paper that opens the volume shows that given reasonable conditions that social choices must satisfy to reflect individual preferences, it is impossible to make a choice among alternatives without violating some of the conditions.

A request from the Ford Foundation for a survey of health economics led to Arrow's famous paper, "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care." Other papers included here deal with racial discrimination, the cost of oil imports, health insurance, environmental resources, and urban economics.

The optimization of production under recursive conditions lends itself to general mathematical methods of dynamic programming and optimal control theory. This is the main theme of the essays included in this fifth volume of Kenneth Arrow's Collected Papers.

The tension between what we wish for and what we can get, between values and opportunities, exists even at the purely individual level. A hermit on a mountain may value warm clothing and yet be hard-pressed to make it from the leaves, bark, or skins he can find. But when many people are competing with each other for satisfaction of their wants, learning how to exploit what is available becomes more difficult. In this volume, Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow analyzes why - and how - human beings organize their common lives to overcome the basic economic problem: the allocation of scarce resources. The price system is one means of organizing society to mediate competition, and Arrow analyzes its successes and failures. Alternative modes of achieving efficient allocation of resources are explored: government, the internal organization of the firm, and the 'invisible institutions' of ethical and moral principles. Professor Arrow shows how these systems create channels to make decisions, and discusses the costs of information acquisition and retrieval. He investigates the factors determining which potential decision variables are recognized as such. Finally, he argues that organizations must achieve some balance between the power of the decision makers and their obligation to those who carry out their decisions - between authority and responsibility.