ABSTRACT
Participants in different systems frequently disagree on the precise meaning of such words as ‘planning’, ‘welfare’, ‘market’ and other socially conditioned concepts. To avoid this ambiguity, one would ideally wish to construct precise definitions of such concepts from simpler ones, starting with undefined ‘primitives’ such as ‘economic’ ‘individual,’ ‘time,’ ‘action,’ and so forth that would be unlikely to elicit disagreement among individuals participating in different systems. An economy consists of three sets: a set of individuals (the economy’s participants); a set of rules, customs and regular procedures constraining their decisions with respect to the economic activities in which they engage (the economy’s system); and a set of the states of the environment in which the economy is embedded in a given period of time and in a given geographic area (the economy’s environment).
