This paper uses Vincent Ostrom's treatment of government as entailing a Faustian bargain to explore some challenges that confront the research program he pursued in the theory of human association. To enable this exploration, I replace the standard resort to the law of the excluded middle with...

National defense is the hard case for the voluntary provision of public goods because without recourse to taxation it is difficult to overcome the free rider problem, much less provide defense superior to that of government provision because of the tremendous costs associated with national...

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...

This paper uses Vincent Ostrom’s treatment of democracy as entailing a Faustian bargain to explore some challenges that confront his research program into the theory of human association. To carry this exploration, I concentrate on Ostrom’s 1997 book, The Meaning of Democracy and 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...

All governments are potential police states. Constitutionally constrained democracies are no exception, as demonstrated by America’s post-9/11 experience. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. government expanded its domestic police powers in the name of protecting the...

In bringing economic analysis to bear on whether a dispute is settled without trial, the presumed institutional setting is typically one of private property where the parties are residual claimants to their legal expenses. Many disputes, however, are between private and public parties. In these...

While going to trial is always an option for settling a legal dispute, settlement prior to trial is the more common response. Settlement allows the parties to avoid the expenses entailed in going to trial, leaving both parties potentially better off than had they gone to trial. Such legal...

The U.S. government is the dominant player in the global arms market. An existing literature emphasizes the many benefits of an international U.S.-government arms monopoly including: regional and global balance, stability and security, the advancement of U.S. national interests, and domestic...

This paper connects the theory of the market process to scholarship on nonviolent action. Doing so advances market process theory by bringing its interaction with nonviolent action and its peace-building potential to the forefront. It advances scholarship on nonviolent action by extending the...