The authors interpret historical evidence in light of a repeated-game model to conclude that merchant guilds emerged during the late medieval period to allow rulers of trade centers to commit to the security of alien merchants. The merchant guild developed the theoretically required attributes,...

This paper presents an economic institution which enabled eleventh-century traders to benefit from employing overseas agents despite the commitment problem inherent in these relations. Agency relations were governed by a coalition--an economic institution in which expectations, implicit...

This paper describes the premodern European institution that supported impersonal exchange, in which a merchant's decision to exchange is independent either of expectations of future exchange with the same partner or of knowledge of that partner's past conduct or the ability to report misconduct...

First draft: July, 1995 This draft: March 4, 1996 <p>Prepared for a symposia on Economic History in the Econometric Society, Seventh World Congress, Tokyo 1995. Forthcoming in Advances in Economic Theory. Edited by David M. Kreps and Kenneth F. Wallis. 1996. Cambridge University Press. <p>This paper...</p></p>

July 11, 1995 <p>In contrast to recent work in Regional Economics which emphasizes the role of an industry's scale in generating agglomeration economies, this paper emphasizes the importance of an industry's composition, that is, the number of firms generating agglomeration economies. As most...</p>