The Elements of Decision Alignment

When one object makes a request of another, why do we expect that the second object\u27s behavior correctly satisfies the first object\u27s wishes? The need to cope with such principal-agent problems shapes programming practice as much as it shapes human organizations and economies. However, the literature about such plan coordination issues among humans is almost disjoint from the literature about these issues among objects. Even the terms used are unrelated. These fields have much to learn from each other---both from their similarities and from the causes of their differences. We propose a framework for thinking about decision alignment as a bridge between these disciplines

Cyclical fluctuations and the structure of production

During the second half of 2006, Giampaolo Garzarelli was researching the yet unsorted Ludwig Moritz Lachmann Archives at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, to see if there was something of interest to consider for an institutional economics project on Lachmann. To the best of his recollections, the archival material at the time was contained in six or seven drawers of two old and rusty metal file cabinets of four drawers each. One of the most intriguing finds, in addition to Lachmann’s eyeglasses, was an Italian offprint from Annali di Statistica e di Economia. The offprint is of a brief 1936 article co-authored with A. M. Neuman entitled ‘Le fluttuazioni cicliche e la struttura della produzione’. The title of the present article is the English translation of the title of this Italian article. This Neuman–Lachmann article does not appear in the Appendix compiled by Tulloh that lists the bibliography of works by Lachmann collected in a well-known posthumous volume. We thus seem to be in the presence of a work that is at least unknown to English readers. This article serves three purposes. First, to offer some background on the authors, their situation and their work at that time; second, to put the article into context by relating it to Lachmann’s broader work on capital; and, third, to offer a translation of this article from Italian to English