We experimentally compare first-price auctions and multilateral negotiations after introducing horizontal product differentiation into a standard procurement setting. Both institutions yield identical surplus for the buyer, a difference from prior findings with homogeneous products that results...

Edward Peter Stringham's book 'Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life' is a compelling defense of the proposition that private governance is more widely used and more effective than most people think. Stringham looks to history to see how people solved problems of fraud...

We explore the intersection of growth theory and the theory of the firm with an experiment. Economic growth is possible in our experiment when agents specialize to exploit increasing returns. We find that low opportunity costs are sufficient for Marshallian internal economies, but that...

Following Smith's line of argument, we discuss the semantics of four economic principles in Chapter III of the 'Wealth of Nations' that compose Adam Smith's famous proposition “that division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.” We apply the Natural Semantic Metalanguage...

The western is a cultural phenomenon of the U.S., but the genealogy of its ideology—aristocratic honor, courage, and justice—extends back to ages of conquest and stories of heroes like Beowulf, Achilles, and Odysseus. Audiences in the infancy of the western craved an idealism taken from the...

In this article we provide a brief account and interpretation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments showing that it departs fundamentally from contemporary patterns of thought in economics that are believed to govern individual behavior in small groups, and contains strong testable propositions...

We use the classes of systematized ethics in Deirdre McCloskey's "The Bourgeois Virtues" to understand characters in HBO's "The Wire" and the story of "The Wire" to understand the bourgeois ethics of the marketplace. McCloskey argues that the introduction of a new system of bourgeois ethics,...

The moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the author Mary Shelley (1798-1851) are studied in different spheres of the academy, for rather different purposes, with no supposed reason for dialogue. We claim in a close concurrent reading, however, that Smith and...