3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Counting equations is not the same as proving that an economic equilibrium exists. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s review of J. R. Hicks’s Value and Capital, which welcomes the ambition to unite static and dynamic economics while challenging the foundations of that synthesis. Morgenstern demands both mathematical proof and a clear relation between theoretical assumptions and observable behaviour. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he considers individual plans: intentions that appear compatible in isolation may destabilize a system when acted upon together, as in simultaneous bank withdrawals. The review offers a pointed account of why expectations, uncertainty, and knowledge of other people’s plans resist simple aggregation—and why, for Morgenstern, a theory of economic fluctuations must earn its connection to the fluctuations it claims to explain.
An armaments boom can raise employment while leaving the long-term unemployed behind and reducing the goods available for civilian life. This tension gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1941 article its sharpest test of conventional unemployment analysis. He treats idle workers, machinery, and materials not as interchangeable reserves but as resources whose particular skills and uses constrain economic adjustment. His skepticism extends to forecasts built on business-cycle regularities and statistics that may assume the patterns they claim to discover. Yet methodological caution does not prevent him from advocating controversial wage reductions, paired with monetary support for the total wage bill. The article lets readers examine both that policy judgment and a concrete problem it cannot settle: how wartime production can expand employment while preparing a difficult transition when military demand ends.
When economies rise and fall together, what establishes that one has transmitted its fluctuations to another? In this 1943 article, Oskar Morgenstern challenges explanations that mistake coincident cycles for causal connections. His alternative begins not with unified national economies but with particular markets: financial sectors across borders may be more closely connected than sectors within the same country. Expectations can travel before money or goods, while aggregate figures can hide capital flows moving in opposite directions. Readers can discover why identifying transmission requires evidence about institutions, timing, and the strength of impulses—not correlation alone. Conceived as a research program rather than a finished theory, the article makes the difficulty of establishing economic interdependence its central subject.
By itself, covariation does not give us information about a possible transmission, because the lags and leads may be due to faults in the material or they may prove to be too shifting.
Economics cannot become exact merely by borrowing the vocabulary of mathematics; it must first clarify what utility, strategy, coalition and stability mean. From that conviction von Neumann and Morgenstern rebuild economic behavior as interdependent choice, where each participant maximizes an outcome he does not control—so games, not single-agent calculation, become the governing model. Read here in the German translation of the 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the argument runs from an axiomatic numerical utility through the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games, where rational play may demand mixed strategies and probability becomes part of optimal design rather than uncertainty. Extending to n-person games, they replace the single optimal outcome with stable sets of imputations—standards of behavior that resist internal domination—and turn coalitions, bargaining and market organization into formal objects against the Lausanne equilibrium tradition.
Man kann nicht exakte Methoden verwenden, solange keine Klarheit in den Begriffen und Fragen besteht, auf die sie angewendet werden sollen.
English translation: “One cannot employ exact methods so long as there is no clarity concerning the concepts and questions to which they are to be applied.”
A statistical method can succeed on artificial data without earning authority over economic observations. That distinction drives Oskar Morgenstern’s review of M. G. Kendall’s study of oscillatory time-series. Kendall’s experiments favour correlogram analysis, but Morgenstern asks whether the result follows from building the test series around the very mechanism that method assumes. His objection is concrete: the empirical Beveridge series have not been shown to share that mechanism, and economic processes may change over the span of a long record. Appreciative of Kendall’s computational labour, yet alert to emerging high-speed machines, Morgenstern argues for larger experiments with varied assumptions rather than a premature ranking of methods. This compact review shows how a seemingly technical comparison turns on what counts as evidence about the process producing the data.
A demand curve, in ordinary teaching, is a path along which buyers slide as prices change. That picture is the error Morgenstern sets out to dismantle. The curve, he argues, is first a schedule of mutually exclusive intentions at a single moment — alternative maximum bids, not a record of successive purchases. Once a buyer actually transacts, expenditure and possession change, and the remaining points no longer mean what they did; a one-variable curve is valid for exactly one transaction unless it is reconstructed through a fresh reaction function. Elasticity, price discrimination, monopolistic competition, and the cobweb theorem all inherit the flaw. What begins as immanent critique of Marshall and Schultz becomes a bridge toward a game-theoretic view of markets as strategic situations that shift with every trade.
Eine individuelle Nachfragekurve einer Variablen ist dann, ganz gleich, welches ihre Form ist, gültig nur für eine einzige Verwendung, d. h. für eine Transaktion.
English translation: “An individual demand curve of a single variable is then, whatever its shape, valid only for one single use, that is, for one transaction.”
Each trader may seek the greatest possible gain, yet a market transaction need not be a straightforward maximization problem: its outcome depends on other independent wills. In this 1948 conference paper, Oskar Morgenstern makes that distinction the basis of his case for game theory in economics. His qualitative exposition moves beyond firms’ conjectures about competitors to the coalitions participants can form—and the payments that can hold those coalitions together. Cartels, labor unions, and buyers combining against a monopolist expose the limitations of treating competition or monopoly as fixed arrangements. Readers can discover why Morgenstern locates stability not in a uniquely optimal price or income distribution, but in sets of alternatives whose availability sustains the outcome actually adopted.
Clearly, free competition will not continue to prevail when people can gain by combining.
A computer can solve a system of equations without making its answer economically trustworthy. In this brief 1949 discussion contribution, Oskar Morgenstern responds to Leontief’s input-output analysis by asking what calculation can establish when observational errors remain unknown. His concern reaches beyond misleading decimal precision: the many zero entries in industrial tables may make solutions easier and more stable while reflecting gaps in information rather than actual economic relationships. Supportive of the research programme, he nevertheless distinguishes computational feasibility from empirical warrant. Readers encounter an economist treating numerical stability, data collection, and model assumptions as connected responsibilities—not problems that faster machines can settle on their own.
Often accuracy is identified with detail; for example, the giving of figures with many decimal points when the real inaccuracy has already been permitted to enter into a much rougher figure.
A firm cannot choose its best course without considering what its rivals may do; a union bargains with an employer whose intentions it cannot fully know. In this 1949 Scientific American article, Oskar Morgenstern presents such interdependence as a mathematical problem that isolated individual maximization cannot capture. His account makes the apparent paradox of rational randomization concrete: unpredictability can protect a player from an opponent. Coalitions introduce a different difficulty, since cooperation creates gains without uniquely determining their distribution. Moving between strategic examples and economic disputes, Morgenstern shows why a solution need not be a single best outcome—and why formal privileges may depend on the bargaining arrangements that sustain them. His ambitions for game theory remain checked by the difficulty of calculating even simplified games.
No single person has control of all the variables, but only of a few.
Why should interchangeable factors guarantee determinate values? In this brief conference abstract, Oskar Morgenstern challenges that familiar economic assumption through game theory. He treats the extra value created by combining factors not as an awkward exception, but as something the characteristic function of an n-person game can describe. His sharper challenge concerns substitution: he points to games involving six players or factors in which substitutability does not permit values to be assigned. The examples are announced rather than demonstrated here, but the distinction is clear: interchangeability need not secure the determinate equilibrium economists seek. This compact statement shows why Morgenstern redirects attention toward the different, more complex game-theoretic notion of a “solution.”
A military program can demand more tanks and ships yet undermine itself by diverting steel from the railroads needed to move them. This concrete tension anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s 1950 article on economic computation: requirements cannot be assessed separately when industries compete for resources and depend on one another’s output. He argues for mathematical analysis while confronting its limits—delayed statistics, information lost through aggregation, and an economy coordinated by decentralized decisions rather than commands. An interindustry calculation traces how an order for chemicals and munitions generates still larger demands elsewhere. The reader discovers both what computation can expose beyond administrative intuition and why proving a program feasible does not establish that it is the best available choice.
Economics had long borrowed its self-image from mechanics, treating prices and quantities as passive magnitudes tending toward equilibrium. Against that inheritance, this programmatic essay introduces the theory of games that Morgenstern developed with John von Neumann, insisting the mathematics is essential rather than decorative. Isolated maximization may suffice for a Robinson Crusoe, or for the limiting cases of monopoly and pure competition; it fails wherever each agent's best move depends on what rivals conceal, threaten, or choose. Two-person zero-sum games yield saddle points and mixed strategies, making bluff and secrecy formal elements of rational conduct; games of three or more introduce coalitions, compensations, and solution sets rather than single equilibria — the natural language of cartels, unions, and bilateral monopoly. Rationality itself, he argues, cannot be defined before the strategic situation has been analyzed.
Jeder einzelne strebt nach seinem maximalen Vorteil, und die Interessen aller oder der meisten stehen miteinander in Widerspruch.
English translation: “Each individual strives for his maximum advantage, and the interests of all, or of most, stand in conflict with one another.”