Economics · Curated list
Supply and demand, Physiocracy, Business cycle and 17 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
Most written-about first. Each description summarises the theory or idea's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
Economic model of price determination in a market
A microeconomic model of how prices are set in a market. Other things being equal, it says, the price per unit of anything traded where competition is perfect will keep shifting until buyers want exactly as much as sellers offer: the market-clearing price, at which price and quantity reach equilibrium.
School of thought in economics
An economic theory worked out by a group of French economists of the 18th-century Enlightenment. They held that the wealth of nations came only from the value of "land agriculture" or "land development", and that farm produce should command high prices.
Intervals of expansion and recession in economic activity
Periods in which economic performance grows generally and then falls into recession. The changes in economic activity that mark them have important consequences for the welfare of the general population, for government institutions and for private firms.
Concept in economics
In Marxian economics, the difference between what a product sells for and what it cost to make: the sale price minus the cost of materials, plant and labour power. The idea came from Ricardian socialism, and William Thompson coined the term "surplus value" in 1824, but it was not consistently told apart from the related ideas of surplus labour and surplus product.
Theory in economics
In economics, the apparent causal link between growth in one sector of an economy and decline in others. The Economist coined the term in 1977 for the decline of manufacturing in the Netherlands after the large Groningen gas field was discovered in 1959.
Overuse of a shared resource
The idea that when a shared resource can benefit an individual at the community's expense, it makes sense for each individual to overuse it, even though together this exhausts the resource for all. The concept has been widely discussed, and criticised, in economics, ecology and other sciences.
Market failure benefitting non-paying users
In economics, a kind of market failure that arises when those who gain from public goods, shared pools of resources or other resources pay too little for them, or nothing at all. By paying nothing, neither directly through tolls or fees nor indirectly through taxes, free riders may overuse shared resources.
Theory in classical and Marxian economics
Often shortened to LTV, the theory that what a good or service is worth economically depends on the total socially necessary labour it takes to make it. It is usually linked with Marxism, though classical economists such as David Ricardo and Adam Smith first used versions of it to explain the long-run "natural price" of commodities.
Sustained downturn in economic activity
A long stretch of economic decline, caused by weaker activity in at least one of the world's big national economies. Economists often see an economic crisis, and the recession that follows it, which may be called a depression, as part of economic cycles in which slowdown follows growth and growth follows slowdown.
Anarchist school of thought and socialist economic theory
An anarchist school of thought and economic theory calling for workers to control the means of production, for property rights based on occupation and use, and for a free market in which workers' cooperatives, one-person businesses and independent artisans trade. Holding the labour theories of property and of value, mutualists reject all profit, all economic rent and all non-nominal interest, as depending, in their view, on exploited labour.
Class of models in the behavioral sciences
Applying decision theory as a guide to understanding economic and social behaviour. It tries to approximate, predict or model human behaviour mathematically, by working out what a rational person would do when faced with those same benefits and costs.
Economic theory promoting local control
An economic theory holding that the world's productive assets should be owned widely, not concentrated. Developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it drew on the principles of Catholic social teaching, above all those of Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and of Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno (1931).
Theory of behavioral economics
A theory of judgment, decision-making and behavioural economics developed in 1979 by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. It was cited when Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Mathematical framework for investment risk
Often shortened to MPT, and also called mean-variance analysis, a mathematical framework for building a portfolio of financial assets that maximises expected return for a given level of risk. It formalises and extends diversification in investing: the idea that holding different kinds of financial assets carries less risk than holding only one.
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Model in economics
In economics, a model dividing economies into three sectors: extracting raw materials (primary), manufacturing (secondary), and services that exist to transport, distribute and sell what the secondary sector makes (tertiary). Colin Clark, Allan Fisher and Jean Fourastié developed it in the first half of the 20th century, as a picture of an industrial economy.
Wikidata · Photo: Safalra (Stephen Morley), Public domain
Economic and political term
Also called trickle-down theory or the horse-and-sparrow theory, a term for government economic policies that favour the top of the economic scale out of proportion. Critics of supply-side economics have used it broadly for tax and spending policies that, deliberately or not, widen income inequality, and it has also been used in criticism of neoliberalism.
Rule from monetary policy
A targeting rule for monetary policy, proposed in 1992 by the American economist John B. Taylor, for central banks to steady economic activity by setting short-term interest rates at the right level.
Concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy
The "law of the value of commodities", usually shortened to the law of value: a central idea of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first set out in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), his polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo's economics. Most broadly, it is a principle regulating how the products of human work are exchanged: their relative exchange-values in trade, usually shown as money prices, are proportional to the average labour-time that society currently needs to make them, under the capitalist mode of production.
Economic theory
A theory holding that economic growth comes mainly from forces within the economy, not from outside it, with investment in innovation, knowledge and human capital contributing substantially.
Concept in economics
A foundational assumption of mathematical economics about decisions made under uncertainty: that rational agents maximise utility, meaning how desirable, subjectively, their actions are.
Every Wikidata item that is an economic theory, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 20 are shown.
Wikidata files these under this list's query, but they are not what the list is about:
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-25. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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