Scalp-Taking

At their arrival in North America, travelers from the Old Continent were exposed to a radically different civilization. Among the many practices that captured their imagination was scalp-taking. During battle, the Native American warrior would often stop after having killed or subdued the enemy and cut-off his scalp. In this paper, we develop an economic theory of this gruesome practice. We argue that scalp-taking emerged as an institutional solution to the problem of monitoring warriors' behavior in the battlefield under conditions of high information costs