3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Behind Theory of Games and Economic Behavior lay a convergence of two unfinished programs. In this memoir, Morgenstern retraces the path from his 1928 work on economic forecasting, where the distinction between "dead" and "live" variables already anticipated strategic interaction and the Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty chase exposed the paradoxes of perfect foresight, to a Princeton encounter he describes as an instantaneous meeting of minds. What began as a short explanatory article grew, through walks and longhand collaboration, into a book that axiomatized expected utility, deployed minimax reasoning, and turned to convexity after his discovery of Jean Ville's proof. He recounts the Vienna Circle background, von Neumann's expanding-economy model, wartime printing by Princeton University Press, and the reviews and translations that followed, an origin story of game theory that doubles as a memorial to a friendship.
We did an enormous amount of work in a very short time, but it was unceasing pleasure and never a time of drudgery.
Austria loosened its foreign-exchange controls partly by ceasing to enforce regulations that remained formally in place. In this 1938 article, Oskar Morgenstern examines that practical retreat from measures introduced after the Credit-Anstalt crisis. His distinctive move is to treat exchange controls as price ceilings: an artificially cheap official rate, he argues, rewarded favored importers, penalized exporters, and aggravated the shortage it was meant to cure. The central tension is between defending a declared currency value and acknowledging the value at which people actually trade. Morgenstern also shows how independent economists helped make that discrepancy publicly intelligible, while recognizing that confidence and administrative experience shaped the pace of reform. Readers can discover how monetary liberalization worked through negotiated exceptions—and why surviving trade restrictions qualified its success.
People compete, cooperate, and act on unequal knowledge; atoms do not. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s first-edition preface to Morton Davis’s book on game theory, dated February 1972 and presented here in its 2005 version. Morgenstern argues that social inquiry needs mathematical concepts fitted to purposeful interaction, rather than borrowed from physics. Yet his demand for precision leads not to a dismissal of nontechnical writing but to a defence of it: accessible explanation succeeds when grounded in detailed theoretical knowledge. His endorsement of Davis thus offers a compact account of what rigorous popular exposition should accomplish—and why, in Morgenstern’s view, explaining emotionally charged social problems need not entail passing value judgments.