How Markets Work and Fail, and What to Make of Them

New Horizons in Institutional and Evolutionary Economics series

Bart Nooteboom, Professor Emeritus, Tilburg University, the Netherlands

In this thought-provoking book, Bart Nooteboom offers a radical critique of the principal intellectual and moral assumptions underlying economic science, unravelling the notion of markets: how they work and fail, and how they may be redirected to better serve us.

‘This book provides a scathing antidote to the standard propositions made by economists about how wonderful market organization is. At the same time the criticism is balanced and recognizes well the advantages of market organization for certain kinds of goods and services. Bart Nooteboom is one of the broadest, and sharpest, social scientists writing today, and this book is vintage Nooteboom.’
– Richard R. Nelson, Columbia University, US