The payday loan industry is one of the fastest growing segments of the consumer financial services market in the United States. The purpose of our study is to design an environment similar to the one that payday loan customers face. We then conduct a laboratory experiment to examine what effect,...

Our primary purpose in this article is to draw upon the literature of classical liberal economy to show how it informs and is informed by the results from experimental economics. Adam Smith's first great book, <italic>The Theory of Moral Sentiments</italic>, serves as our chief source of insights for...

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 article we investigate how people construct a convention for property in an experiment in which groups of self-selected individuals can...

The traditional analysis of exclusionary bundling examines the impact of a monopolist bundling product A with another product B, which is competitively provided. Using experimental posted-offer markets, we investigate the exclusionary and welfare implications of having a fringe competitor in the...

We report a policy experiment that illustrates a potential problem of using historical pass-through rates as a means of predicting the competitive consequences of projected firm-specific cost savings in antitrust contexts, particularly in merger analysis. The effects of cost savings on welfare...

We design an experiment to explore how geography shapes exchange between spatially distant markets and hypothesize that geographical isolation of traveling intermediaries from stationary sources of production creates social isolation that hinders trade. We characterize our economies with a...