We experiment with integrating economics and ethics in a form that could be described as literary-critical economic nonfiction. After offering an interpretation of Percy Shelley's “Prometheus Unbound,” we map the modern world of commerce into our interpretation of the lyrical drama to...

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...

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...