This laboratory experiment explores the extent to which impersonal exchange emerges from personal exchange with opportunities for long-distance trade. We design a three-commodity production and exchange economy in which agents in three geographically separated villages must develop multilateral...

Adam Smith identified two key components in the wealth creation process of human societies: exchange and specialization. More than two centuries later relatively little is understood about the underlying process by which people build exchange systems and discover comparative advantage. In this...

Why do people follow rules? We offer a short interdisciplinary survey on rule‐following, sketching various answers to the question offered by economists, psychologists, and philosophers. We start with a broad and colloquial notion of rules that spans from concrete, formal regulations to...

The history of the world is strewn with the remains of societies whose institutions failed to adapt to ecological change, but the determinants of institutional fragility are difficult to identify in the historical record. We report a laboratory experiment that explores the impact of an exogenous...

In this article we provide a brief account and interpretation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments showing that it departs fundamentally from contemporary patterns of thought in economics that are believed to govern individual behavior in small groups, and contains strong testable propositions...

One robust result in experimental economics is the failure to observe equilibrium play in the ultimatum game. A heretofore unnoticed feature of the game is that neither player voluntarily chooses to play the game. Motivated by Adam Smith's proposition that beneficence — like that of...

In this paper we study the performance of an economic environment that can support specialization if the participants implement and develop some system of exchange. We define a closed economy in which the participants must discover the ability to exchange, implement it, and ascertain what they...