Murray Rothbard's posthumous Economic Thought Before Adam Smith is notable for its vilification of 'the quiet Scottish professor.' While there is little disagreement that Smith was, at best, an ambivalent champion of free markets, Rothbard's indictment of him as a proto-Marxist is less than...

This article explores a possible connection between two behavioural anomalies in economics, the observed responsiveness of individual decision makers to sunk costs, and the apparent failure of backward induction to predict outcomes in experimental bargaining games. In particular, we show that...

While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial effects, empirical evidence of such effects is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a real-effort...

Donations in-kind can be a mixed blessing for charities, who are often more adept at solicitation than resale. Many organizations rely on raffles to turn donations into cash, but auctions are also common. Theory predicts that all-pay mechanisms should produce more revenue than winner-pay...

Using a variant of the Michl-Baldani (2000) model of technical change as a strategic choice, this paper describes alternative foundations for the achievement of "positive class consciousness." The first is based on the Folk Theorem(s) of repeated games, while the second views the robust...

<title>Abstract</title> Economists have become interested in the behavior of random processes with positive feedback but have sometimes found it difficult to introduce students to this research. Simulation of the law of large numbers with increasing amounts of feedback provides a convenient framework for such...

Despite its popularity as a fundraiser for charities, very little research has been done on the bidding and revenue properties of the silent auction. This paper examines the consequences of two behaviors common in silent auctions, jump-bidding and sniping, in laboratory experiments with...