This paper uses a laboratory experiment to probe the proposition that property emerges anarchically out of social custom. We test the hypothesis that whalers in the 18th and 19th century developed rules of conduct that minimized the sum of the transaction and production costs of capturing their...

Research shows that many animal species have morphological and cognitive adaptations for fighting with others to gain resources, but it remains unclear how humans make fighting decisions. Non-human animals often adaptively calibrate fighting behavior to ecological variables such as resource...

We report an experiment designed to study whether inecient rms are systematically driven from overcrowded markets. We implement a series of 3800 wars of attrition of a type modeled in Fudenberg and Tirole (1986). Exit tends to be ecient and exit times conform reasonably well to point predictions...

If, as Hume argues, property is a self-referring custom of a group of people, then property rights depend on how that group forms and orders itself. In this paper we investigate how people construct a convention for property in an experiment in which groups of self-selected individuals can...

In this paper, we investigate the implications of the philosophical considerations presented in Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by examining group formation in a laboratory setting where subjects engage in both cooperative and conflictual interactions. We endow participants with a...