The Austrian School (also known as the Vienna School or the Psychological School) is a school of economic thought that emphasizes the spontaneous organizing power of the price mechanism. Austrians hold that the complexity of subjective human choices makes mathematical modelling of the evolving market extremely difficult (or undecidable) and advocate a laissez faire approach to the economy. Austrian School economists advocate the strict enforcement of voluntary contractual agreements between economic agents, and hold that commercial transactions should be subject to the smallest possible imposition of forces they consider to be coercive (in particular the smallest possible amount of government intervention).

The Austrian School derives its name from its predominantly Austrian founders and early supporters, including Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Ludwig von Mises. Other prominent Austrian School economists of the 20th century include Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek. (CC Wikipedia)

Catallaxy is influenced by Ludwig von Mises’s term Catallactics and was first used by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. He was unhappy with the usage of the term Economy, feeling that the Greek root of the word, which could be translated as ‘household management’, implied that economic agents in a market economy possessed shared goals. Economy is used by Aristotle as ‘the art of household management’ and part of the virtue of wisdom. Keeping in mind that the ‘household’ at Aristotle is used in a broader sense either for a private household or for the household of a state and even if the household at the times of Aristotle could have been a large business unit containing family and thousands of slaves, it was lead towards shared goals which differs from what a market economy is about. Catallaxy as a ‘Science of Exchange’ describes according to Hayek: “the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market”. (CC Wikipedia)