Coordination games have become a critical tool of analysis in fields such as development and institutional economics. Understanding behavior in coordination games is an important step towards understanding the differing success of teams, firms and nations. This paper investigates the...

This short essay is written for inclusion in a set of essays all written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of publication of The Calculus of Consent. These essays are purposefully short, and are meant to be personal statements of the significance of The Calculus to the author and not...

In bringing economic analysis to bear on the settlement of legal disputes, it is commonly presumed that the parties to the dispute are governed by the principles of private property and so are residual claimants to their legal expenses. This institutional framework promotes a substantive...

Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly assume that taxation must be the primary instrument for generating revenue. This assumption is neither historically accurate nor theoretically necessary. Rather, it universalizes an institutional arrangement that is particular to the...

Economists commonly use the Edgeworth box to illustrate the ability of exchange to generate gains from trade. In contrast to this framework of dyadic exchange, we explore triadic forms of exchange where margins of coercion are also present. In the presence of triadic exchange, market...

Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly wrongly assume that taxation is necessary to finance public goods. Taxation isn't necessary to finance public goods because free riding is an institutional artifact of the analytical dichotomy between public and private goods, which prevents...

Any competitive process selects among qualities possessed by the competitors, and with different processes selecting for different qualities. While the competitive form is universal, the substantive qualities that are selected depend on the particular environment within which competition occurs....

Prevailing ideology holds that democracy is a system of government where people govern themselves. This ideology clashes with the unavoidable recognition that in any but small towns and villages governance is an activity wherein a few govern and the many are governed. This situation is an...

Thinking was Gordon Tullock's primary interest in life. He let his thinking roam widely and creatively over his many fields of interest; moreover, Tullock is widely recognized for the robust and creative quality of this thought. He left a valuable legacy. All the same, I think the value of that...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy. Markets are thought to secure coordination in self-organized fashion. In contrast, polities are portrayed as securing coordination through planning and administration. Doing this is to commit what Mitchel Resnick (1994) calls the...