IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/hop/hopeec/v47y2015i3p511-534.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Quality Uncertainty in Early Economic Thought

Author

Listed:
  • Sylvie Lupton

Abstract

This article highlights the contributions of early economic thought to quality uncertainty. Both Roman law regarding fraud and medieval thinkers (such as Vacarius, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Astesanus of Asti) scrutinized asymmetric information and shared uncertainty regarding product quality, although not in the same terms as the modern literature. This retrospective analysis will help clarify how early economic thought can enlighten us both on the nature and consequences of quality uncertainty and the mechanisms to address it, and may have even predicted the issues that have been addressed by modern information economics.

Suggested Citation

  • Sylvie Lupton, 2015. "Quality Uncertainty in Early Economic Thought," History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, vol. 47(3), pages 511-534, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:47:y:2015:i:3:p:511-534
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/47/3/511.full.pdf+html
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jean-Sébastien Lenfant, 2017. "Early Debates on Quality, Market Coordination and Welfare in the U.S. in the 1930s," Working Papers hal-01763828, HAL.
    2. Pierre Januard, 2022. "Risks on Trade: The Activity of the Merchant in Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on the Sentences," Working Papers halshs-03313255, HAL.
    3. Pierre Januard, 2022. "At the Boundaries of the Trading Sphere: The Appearance of the 'Just Price' in Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on the Sentences," Working Papers halshs-03658417, HAL.
    4. Chloé Tankam & Dominique Vollet & Olivier Aznar, 2019. "Between information asymmetry and shared uncertainty, an analysis of organic certification systems for the Kenyan domestic market [Entre asymétrie d'information et incertitude partagée analyse des ," Post-Print hal-02534461, HAL.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:47:y:2015:i:3:p:511-534. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?viewby=journal&productid=45614 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.