A fundamental principle of economics with which Adam Smith begins The Wealth of Nations is the division of labor. Some firms, however, have been pursuing a practice called job rotation, which assigns each worker not to a single and specific task but to a set of several tasks among which he or...

Methods of tax collection employed by modern governments seem dull when compared to the rich variety observed in history. Whereas most governments today typically use salaried agents to collect taxes, various other types of contractual relationships have been observed in history, including...

In our late twentieth century experience, survival of an economy seems critically dependent on well established rights to private property and a return to labor that rewards greater effort. But that need not be so. History provides examples of micro-socialist economies that internally, at least,...

The notion that damages should be multiplied by the reciprocal of the probability of punishment has been around since Bentham and is one of the basic lessons of the law and economics literature. However, the simple "1/p" multiplier turns out be inapplicable in the civil damages setting. The...

We examine the link between social institutions and individuals' propensity to cooperate in a simple game theoretic framework. To begin, we transform the usual prisoner's dilemma game over material payoffs into one with utility payoffs by including non-material preferences. By introducing a...