Cinema and TV : an empirical investigation of Italian consumers / Andrea Sisto, Roberto Zanola -- Smoke signals : adolescent smoking and school continuation / Philip J. Cook, Rebecca Hutchinson -- Fashion, growth and welfare : an evolutionary approach / Andreas Chai, Peter E. Earl, Jason Potts -- Fashion : why people like it and theorists do not / Luciano Andreozzi, Marina Bianchi -- Does context matter more for some goods than others? / Robert H. Frank -- From Carl Menger's theory of goods to an evolutionary approach to consumer behaviour / Wilhelm Ruprecht -- What shall I do? (or why consumer theory should focus on time-use and activities, rather than on commodities) / Ian Steedman -- Idiosyncratic learning, creative consumption and well-being / Marina Di Giacinto, Francesco Ferrante -- A shacklean approach to the demand for movies / John Sedgwick -- The evolution of entertainment consumption and the emergence of cinema, 1890-1940 / Gerben Bakker -- Introduction / Marina Bianchi.

The theory of consumer choice fills the opening chapters of any micro-economic textbook. Yet, surprisingly, this position of privilege has not translated into a flourishing of economic research that is comparable to what has happened in other branches of economic reasoning. Starting with Menger, the Austrian economic tradition has always shifted the focus of attention from the problem of equilibrium to that of social order, to the evolution of norms, institutions and practices that favor social cooperation and coordination. Within this tradition competition and markets are not viewed as states, but as processes in which change and errors occur and efficiency is reached but also easily lost. The real economic problem becomes a problem of knowledge how it is discovered, how it is transmitted. Consumers interactions and choices and actual consumption practices play an important role in these evolving forms of sociality. And it is within this framework, that allows for experimentation and learning, that they should be studied. This title is part of the Advances in Austrian Economics series. It contains a collection of high-level papers on the evolution of consumption.