This laboratory experiment explores the extent to which impersonal exchange emerges from personal exchange with opportunities for long-distance trade. We design a three-commodity production and exchange economy in which agents in three geographically separated villages must develop multilateral...

We design an experiment to explore how geography shapes exchange between spatially distant markets and hypothesize that geographical isolation of traveling intermediaries from stationary sources of production creates social isolation that hinders trade. We characterize our economies with a...

Adam Smith identified two key components in the wealth creation process of human societies: exchange and specialization. More than two centuries later relatively little is understood about the underlying process by which people build exchange systems and discover comparative advantage. In this...

Why do people follow rules? We offer a short interdisciplinary survey on rule‐following, sketching various answers to the question offered by economists, psychologists, and philosophers. We start with a broad and colloquial notion of rules that spans from concrete, formal regulations to...