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

In this paper, we investigate the implications of the philosophical considerations presented in Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by examining group formation in a laboratory setting where subjects engage in both cooperative and conflictual interactions. We endow participants with a...

This paper attempts to clarify our understanding of the everyday use of fair as we apply it to economic behavior. I first examine the decomposition of fair into its semantic primitives and discuss implications of recent research which indicates that the word is untranslatable into any other...

This article uses a laboratory experiment to examine the question of whether justice and fairness are different motivational forces in the dictator game. ‘‘Justice’’ and ‘‘fairness’’ are often used interchangeably because their meanings and usages are so closely linked, despite...

We compare first-price auctions to an exchange process that we term ``multilateral negotiations.'' In multilateral negotiations, a buyer solicits price offers for a homogeneous product from sellers with privately known costs, and then plays the sellers off one another to obtain additional price...

This paper attempts to explicate the meaning of reciprocate in economics. I first show using innate universal concepts that the definition of reciprocate appears to be circular. This circularity problem vanishes, however, when the context of the interaction is introduced as the inextricable link...

Zone pricing in wholesale gasoline markets is a contentious topic in the public policy debate. With a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate the competitive effects of zone pricing on consumers, retail stations, and refiners vis-á-vis the proposed policy prescription of uniform...