Per Bylund

author of "The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect our Everyday Lives" and "The Problems of Production: A New Theory of the Firm"

December 7, 2016

Per Bylund is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Records-Johnston Professor of Free Enterprise in the School of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. His research focuses on issues in entrepreneurship, strategic management, and organizational economics – especially where they overlap and intersect with regulation and policy issues.

He is an associate fellow of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, a research fellow at the McQuinn Center of Entrepreneurial Leadership, and an Associated Scholar with the Mises Institute as well as senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises-institutet i Sverige

His research aims to explain the market process of wealth-creation and economic development with a focus on organizations, institutions, strategic management and entrepreneurship. He has several papers and a forthcoming book on the theory of the firm, especially targeting and attempting to illuminate the economic function of the firm – both to the entrepreneur and as a means to explain the evolution of market structure. His research has been published in several scholarly journals, including the Journal of Management Studies, Managerial and Decision Economics, Managerial Decision, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

He has authored two books, both published in 2016: "The Problem of Production: A New Theory of the Firm" (Routledge) on the economic theory of organization and the firm; and "The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives" (Lexington) that provides the reader with an introduction to economic reasoning to understand the market and regulation.

"The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect our Everyday Lives" illuminates the real effects of regulations on people's everyday lives. It traces the effects of regulations on an economy by working through the ripple effects of changes. In so doing, the book provides a fundamental understanding for the economy as an organism rather than a machine, and enlightens the reader by offering a model for understanding the economy and market. Regulations, which are restrictions placed on the working of the economy, have consequences, both intended and unintended, direct and indirect. While the direct effects are well understood, the indirect effects are often overlooked because they don't fit with the machine understanding of an economy. More to the point, this book emphasizes the real effects of regulation and market change on individual actors, thereby stressing how the economy works to provide an individual with the options that exist in choice situations. We draft a new definition of prosperity and well-being which focuses on the individual's access to valuable alternatives. From this point of view, the real implications of regulation are traced step by step, following the logic of exchange and the effects on individual actors rather than the economy as a whole.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2017-honorees-b/per-bylund

Last Updated: 12 January 2022