Research has shown that natural language communication is more effective than intention-signaling in promoting coordination. Our paper studies the reasons behind this finding. We hypothesize that, when communicating with natural language, people use and respond to both intentions and attitudes,...

In 1919, in the wake of the Central Power’s defeat in World War I, Ludwig von Mises published his second book, Nation, State, and Economy. The book explores the consequences of war and the type of political and economic arrangements likely to generate a lasting peace in the future. This paper...

Economics as a social science is about exchange and the institutions within which exchange relationships are formed and transactions are executed. Yoram Barzel's contribution to economics and political economy reflect this focus on exchange and institutions. In this paper, I will sketch a theory...

This is a review article of The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, edited by Roger Congleton, Bernard Grofman, and Stefan Voigt. This two-volume collection has 90 chapters, with each chapter averaging 20.4 pages (excluding the volumes' indexes). My subtitle conveys my judgment of this work. The...

The particular focus of this chapter will be to analyze institutional change from an Ostromian perspective by analyzing the relationship between self-governance, polycentricity, and federalism. Throughout work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, there exist two consistent themes regarding the...

This essay is the penultimate draft of Chapter 1 of a book that carries the working title Macroeconomics as Systems Theory: Emergence, Institutions, and Economic Process. This book examines the material of macroeconomic theory by looking through a different analytical window from what most...

Food is not a trivial issue in the Caribbean. The islands of the Caribbean are usually characterized as densely populated and dependent on food imports as a result of their colonial history as producers of sugar in large plantations and under conditions of slavery. The story is largely true....

The meritocratic fairness ideal implies that inequalities in earnings are regarded as fair only when they reflect differences in performance. Consequently, implementation of the meritocratic fairness ideal requires complete information about individual performances, but in practice, such...

Ostension is the act or process of showing, as in showing a child a fossil while saying “fossil.” Here collected are 59 quotations about language, discourse, ostension, and semantics. A theme is the “facts are theory-laden” spiral between language and discourse, between explananda and...

We test the hypothesis that strategic interactions foster overconfidence. We experimentally compare an environment where players have an incentive to overstate their own ability to deter competitors, with one where this incentive is removed. We find that overconfidence persists in the former...