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 exploring the impact of an exogenous...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether the protection of intellectual property (IP) incentivizes people to create non-rivalrous knowledge goods, foregoing the production of other rivalrous goods. In the contrasting treatment with no IP protection, participants are free to resell...

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...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that “peasants” have to violence-empowered “elites”. The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites enforce and operate...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to probe the proposition that property emerges anarchically out of social custom. We test the hypothesis that whalers in the 18th and 19th century developed rules of conduct that minimized the sum of the transaction and production costs of capturing their...

We report an experiment designed to study whether inecient rms are systematically driven from overcrowded markets. We implement a series of 3800 wars of attrition of a type modeled in Fudenberg and Tirole (1986). Exit tends to be ecient and exit times conform reasonably well to point predictions...