Economists generally accept as given the old adage that there's no accounting for tastes. Gary Becker disagrees, and in this collection he confronts the problem of preferences and values: how they are formed and how they affect our behaviour. In the process he explores puzzles of social life as well as some of society's problems. He observes, for example, that adjacent restaurants, which have roughly the same quality of food and similar prices, may differ greatly in the number of customers they are able to attract. Why is one invariably full, while the other has seats to spare? And why is it that the profits of tobacco companies may rise when consumption falls?
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