Is it possible to trade with bandits? When government is absent, the superior strength of some agents makes it cheaper for them to violently steal what they desire from weaker agents than to use trade to obtain what they want. Such was the case with middlemen who interacted with producers in...

According to conventional wisdom, self-governance cannot facilitate order between the members of different social groups. This is considered particularly true for the members of social groups who are avowed enemies of one another. This paper argues that self-governance can do this. To...

In this paper, we examine the resiliency of community recovery after a natural disaster. We argue that a resilient recovery requires robust economic/financial institutions, political/legal institutions, and social/cultural institutions. We explore how politically and privately created disaster...

Standard theory neglects that enacting price discrimination is costly to firms. When this costliness is accounted for, perfect price discrimination is often socially inefficient. For pure monopolists it is sometimes socially inefficient. For monopolistic competitors it is always socially...

Most models of Central and Eastern European transition fail to appreciate the "de facto" organising principles that governed life in the Soviet--type system. Concentration has instead been focused on the "de jure" pronouncements of what constituted these systems. It is this misidentification, we...

We argue that mass media is a mechanism of institutional evolution and identify three important effects media has on institutions. The 'gradual effect' involves media contributing to marginal changes in existing institutions. The 'punctuation effect' involves media catalyzing rapid institutional...