Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit.

KNIGHT, Frank H.

Item Number: 4602

Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921.

First edition. Octavo, original cloth. In very good condition with some wear and chipping to the crown of the spine. First printings are rare.

Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, In economics, "Knightian uncertainty" is risk that is immeasurable, impossible to calculate. Knightian uncertainty is named after University of Chicago economist Frank Knight (1885-1972), who distinguished risk and uncertainty in his work "Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit": "Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated.... The essential fact is that 'risk' means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating.... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or 'risk' proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all."