ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief description of the pragmatic market socialist proposal along with a sketch of its principal economic pros and cons. It offers a thumbnail appraisal of four areas of peripheral theory (principal-agent, uncertainty and information, property rights, and public choice) as they might relate to the potential performance of a pragmatic market socialist economy. This is followed by a careful analysis of certain arguments put forward in the Roemer-Bardhan compendium by Joseph Stiglitz, Joseph Berliner, Louis Putterman, and others. The chapter discusses and evaluates four distinct variants of market socialism discernible in the literature: Langian, service, cooperative, and pragmatic. Of the four, pragmatic market socialism would operate most similarly to the contemporary real-world capitalist economy in the leading industrial nations of North America and Western Europe. A more intense profit motivation among high corporation executives under pragmatic market socialism is one reason why such an economy might exhibit better economic performance than the contemporary capitalist economy.
