In a world without intellectual property protection, inventors have an incentive to sell (and firms have an incentive to buy) inventions as secrets. In this paper, I give a general framework about how a market for secret inventions can operate. Specifically, I model the auction as a game between...

The power of agenda setters is often raised when teaching parliamentary rules in political science and public choice classrooms. Most students do not have a frame of reference to understand the topic, and fail to internalize it. This paper describes a classroom experiment putting students in the...

In the classical economic view of markets a third party is needed to create and protect property rights. This should make black markets where the government actively opposes rights in the goods and services traded impossible, yet we see functional black markets across the world. We argue that...