Introduction

What is a market economy ? How does it work ? These two fundamental questions respectively provide the subjects of this book. They obviously encapsulate the essential parts of economics. Economics is indeed fundamentally concerned firstly with the definition, the representation, explicit or implicit, of a market economy, and secondly with the understanding of how this market economy “can bring order to a decentralized world of many agents” (Hahn, 1992). Thus, raising these two ambitious questions and more, pretending to bring answers in one single book may appear to be a disproportionate challenge. And certainly it is. We shall however explain later why implementing such a seemingly unfeasible project. Nevertheless make the experience and try to ask a student, a researcher or a professor, the question: “What is a market economy ?”, and wait for a precise and clear answer. We did it. Very interesting…