Do markets provide adequate incentives for entrepreneurs to effectively assure consumers of authenticity, safety, and quality in the presence of asymmetric information? Early American whiskey markets, where whiskey was commonly sold out of open barrels, present a classic case of asymmetric...

Spontaneous or emergent orders in human affairs are based upon voluntary interactions among individuals. Yet the physical environment influences the subsequent interactions which occur. While the interactions may be voluntary, the confines of a built environment – physical systems and...

Profit-maximizing organizers of sports contests have an incentive to implement rules that increase the attractiveness of sports contest for spectators. But prohibitively high enforcement costs can prevent organizers from implementing certain rules. We argue that in these instances unofficial...

During a time when religious animosities were reaching their peak in Medieval Europe leading up to the violent crusades, Christians, Jews, and Muslims residing in close proximity in Medieval Spain experienced a period of relative peace, prosperity, and cultural exchange. This historical episode,...

Early efforts to tame man’s passions going back to antiquity focused on the repression of those passions. As the political and social sciences emerged, the argumentative focus shifted from repressing to harnessing man's passions. This is what produced the discovery of the "invisible hand"...

There is a wide consensus that the U.S. K-12 public education system is in need of fundamental reform. Reformers face two primary barriers to reform; knowledge and incentive problems. Knowledge problems represent the epistemic difficulties inherent in designing a top-down educational system...

Classical economists since the days of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers held that one of the primary arguments for capitalism, in addition to its superior economic efficiency and its grounding in robust political economy, was its civilizing role. They recognized that commerce channels...

We assess the impact of two groups of economists; mainline economists, who regard economics primarily as the science of exchange and mainstream economists, who perceive economics primarily as the science of choice. To control for scholarly quality we investigate the citation impact of Nobel...