A law earns its place by clarifying how a pattern is produced, not only by naming it.
DOMAIN 0415 PUBLISHED GUIDES
Economics & Organizations
Patterns produced by incentives, markets, institutions, coordination, management, and measurement.
CENTRAL QUESTION
How do incentives and institutions reshape behavior?
- Working scale
- Individuals to markets
- Primary lens
- Data + institutional analysis
15Published
04Defined subfields
FULLSource standard
ENEditorial language
SUBCATEGORY MAP
The field at a glance.
Each subfield has a distinct object of study. Published areas are active now; planned areas show how the collection will grow.
01
Incentives
PublishedRewards, penalties, trade-offs, and unintended responses.
02
Markets
PublishedPrices, exchange, competition, information, and allocation.
03
Management
PublishedCoordination, hierarchy, operations, and organizational design.
04
Metrics
PublishedTargets, indicators, evaluation, and measurement effects.
PUBLISHED GUIDES
In Economics & Organizations
Every guide includes meaning, mechanism, applications, limitations, related concepts, and traceable references.
Metrics003
Social-science heuristic
Goodhart's Law
When people are rewarded for a proxy, they adapt to the proxy, weakening the relationship between the number and the goal it once represented.
Management008
Prioritization heuristic and statistical model
Pareto Principle
Concentration, the vital few, Pareto charts, power-law tails, and disciplined prioritization.
Management009
Organizational and time-allocation aphorism
Parkinson's Law
Deadlines, elastic scope, procrastination, coordination drag, and bureaucratic growth.
Markets022
Competitive market equilibrium model
Law of Supply and Demand
Prices coordinate competing plans: quantity demanded usually falls with price, quantity supplied usually rises, and their intersection defines a model equilibrium.
Markets023
Monetary circulation regularity
Gresham's Law
When two monies must trade at a fixed legal ratio that misprices their market values, the overvalued money tends to circulate while the undervalued money is retained, melted, or exported.
Incentives034
Contracting problem under asymmetric information
Principal-Agent Problem
When one party delegates work to another but cannot fully observe action, information, or objectives, a contract must trade stronger incentives against risk, measurement error, and distorted behavior.
Markets038
No-arbitrage option-pricing model
Black-Scholes-Merton Model
A dynamically hedged contingent claim can be valued from the underlying price process, volatility, time, strike, and risk-free financing under idealized market assumptions.
Incentives050
Institutional bargaining benchmark
Coase Theorem
With well-defined rights, complete information, and zero transaction costs, bargaining can reach an efficient allocation regardless of the initial assignment of rights, though distribution still differs.
Incentives055
Short-run production regularity
Law of Diminishing Returns
Holding at least one productive input fixed, adding more of another input will eventually increase output by progressively smaller amounts, even while total output may continue to rise.
Markets064
Efficiency-rebound hypothesis
Jevons Paradox
Efficiency improvements can reduce the effective cost of a resource service enough that demand growth offsets, or even exceeds, the resource saved per unit of service.
Metrics065
Indicator-corruption principle
Campbell's Law
The more a quantitative social indicator is used for consequential decision-making, the more pressure it faces to be manipulated and to distort the activity it was intended to monitor.
Incentives083
Perverse-incentive heuristic
Cobra Effect
A policy can worsen the problem it targets when rewards make producing, hiding, or reclassifying the measured problem profitable.
Management084
Organizational promotion hypothesis
Peter Principle
Hierarchies that promote people mainly for performance in their current role can move them into jobs requiring different abilities, eventually reducing fit.
Markets085
Relative-cost growth mechanism
Baumol's Cost Disease
Labor-intensive services with slow measured productivity growth can become relatively more expensive when wages rise with high-productivity sectors.
Markets086
Common-value auction effect
Winner's Curse
In a common-value auction, the highest bidder is disproportionately likely to have received an overly optimistic signal unless the bid adjusts for winning.
CROSS-DOMAIN LINKS
No field stands alone.
These connections show where the domain borrows methods, mechanisms, or evidence from the rest of the library.
Scientific status, operating range, evidence quality, and common misuse stay visible.
Original publications, official records, and serious scholarship take priority.