Deception in Markets

Caroline Gerschlager is Lecturer of economics at the University of Vienna and the University of Economics and Business Administration in Austria. She is also research director for the state-funded international project on economic perceptions of deception at the Institute of Economics.

• Introduction; C.Gerschlager PART I: THE RATIONALITY OF DECEPTION Deception and Game Theory; S.A.T.Rizvi Rational Deception; P.Dumouchel A Deceptive Journey From Rational Expectations to Bounded Rationality; E-M.Sent PART II: BEHAVIOR AND INCENTIVES TO DECEIVE: THE SUCCESS OF DECEPTION IN MARKETS Deception in Markets: The Enron Case; C.Gerschlager Deception in Economics Experiments; R.T.A.Croson Self-Deception and Deception in Capital Markets; J.Coval, D.Hirshleifer & S.H.Teoh PART III: SUBJECTIVISM AND DECEPTIVE BEHAVIOR IN MARKETS Price Theory and the Study of Deception in the Exchange Process; L.S.Moss PART IV: SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND REGULATION: HOW TO CONTROL DECEPTION Deception, Regulation and Politics; A.Hamlin Deception, Self-Deception and New Institutional Economics; G.Kubon-Gilke PART V: PRECONDITIONS OF MARKETS AND DECEPTION: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Deception and Its Preconditions: Issues Raised by Financial Markets; V-A.Lépinay & E.Hertz Deception in Economic Anthropology; P.van der Grijp Gift Exchange, Play and Deception; M.Hénaff

'Though deception, cheating, lying and fraud are common in the market system, remarkably they have been mostly overlooked by economists. This wonderfully diverse collection makes excellent contribution to changing this state of affairs by demonstrating the difference that deception makes to rationality theory and competition. Very much recommended for those interested in sorting out new directions in economic theory.' - Professor John Davis, University of Amsterdam and Marquette University'With the experience of Enron and Parmalat still fresh in our minds, this volume supplies a timely and revealing discussion of deception: how it arises and what can be done about it. The insights of mainstream economics are supplemented by those of psychology and anthropology and the result is an exciting piece of social science.' - Professor Shaun Hargreaves-Heap, University of East Anglia, UK'Caroline Gerschlager has assembled an international set of scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss a most timely subject - deception in markets and self-deception in human relations. The scholars do not only discuss what went wrong recently in markets in Europe and the US. They also discuss what might have gone wrong in the discipline of economics for its failure to anticipate the recent massive market as well as institutional failures.' - Elias L. Khalil, Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems, Germany