ABSTRACT
One of Knight’s favorite ways of sustaining the tension between the strengths of an economic science and its limited range of applicability was by contrasting the
neoclassical metaphor of the market as a mechanical maximization process with the metaphor of the market as a game. In contrast with Veblen, who spoke of the interplay between rivals in the market as a game of prowess and predation exhibiting the arrested moral development of capitalist society (see especially Veblen 1899, 1904), Knight used the notion of gaming behavior in the market to highlight the exploratory and essentially moral nature of exchange behavior. As we shall see, for Knight the fact that the market as a form of social organization enabled playful behavior had both positive and negative effects on society.
