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Armen Alchian

On April 12, 1914, American economist Armen Alchian was born. His contributions to economic theory and teaching were many and varied — his textbook, co-authored with William R. Allen, University Economics (also titled Exchange and Production), was widely considered one of the finest intermediate texts in microeconomics — but he remains perhaps best known for his work on property rights.

Alchian died in 2014, in late February, at the age of 99.

1 reply on “Armen Alchian”

University Economics [1964, 1967, 1972] and Exchange and Production [1969, 1977, 1983] are very similar books, but I don’t think that Alchian and Allen considered them to be different editions of one work. Note that the first edition of the latter appeared between the second and third of the former, and as it happens with the same publisher.

In any case, the most mature presentation of these ideas from Alchian and Allen is in Universal Economics [2018], at a much lower price than is now typically fetched by those two earlier works.

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