In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic...

We introduce and justify a taxonomy for the structure of markets and minimal institutions which appear in constructing minimally complex trading structures to perform the functions of price formation, settlement and payments. Each structure is presented as a playable strategic market game and is...

Hypersalience describes the cognitive error that occurs when taxpayers are highly aware of a tax provision generally, but fail to correctly perceive its associated limitations. The charitable contribution deduction provides a strong example of hypersalience as taxpayers have general awareness...

If passed into law, the Marketplace Fairness Act would impose a federal duty on out-of-state sellers to collect a state-defined and state-benefitting use tax. This unique exercise of federal power implicates due process. The PACT Act represents the only other instance in which Congress has...

The direct charitable contribution deduction was an experimental deduction for the 1982-1986 tax years. It represents the only example in the tax laws in which non-itemizers were allowed a charitable contribution deduction in tandem with the standard deduction. This article offers a review of...

Considerable evidence demonstrates that significant dispersion exists in the prices charged for seemingly homogeneous goods. This paper adopts a simple, flexible equilibrium model of search to investigate the way the market structure influences price dispersion. Using the noisy search approach,...

This article updates the literature analyzing the charitable deduction associated with live-burn donations. This deduction has been the subject of multiple recent Tax and appellate Court rulings, all of which have disallowed the deduction. The article examines and reconciles the resulting...

Commonly observed patterns typically follow a few distinct families of probability distributions. Over one hundred years ago, Karl Pearson provided a systematic derivation and classification of the common continuous distributions. His approach was phenomenological: a differential equation that...

We show that the natural scaling of measurement for a particular problem defines the most likely probability distribution of observations taken from that measurement scale. Our approach extends the method of maximum entropy to use measurement scale as a type of information constraint. We argue...

The interaction of capital stock with overlapping generations is investigated where the time structures of human capital and other physical capital does not match. We consider the economies with either gold or fiat as the outside money and consider the financing problems that appear in the...