Bitter Wine was the 23rd episode of the premiere season of the Emmy-nominated Western, Have Gun - Will Travel. Gun-for-hire Paladin settles an externality issue between a small scale vintner and neighboring oilman a la Coase, but two years before Coase's seminal paper. This 1958 episode acutely...

This paper looks to explore the effects of James Buchanan's book Cost and Choice since its publication. I discuss how Cost and Choice has had a limited impact on the treatment of welfare economics within Law & Economics. I then elaborate on Buchanan's discussion to highlight other issues within...

A problem that has plagued market failure discussions is: "why does bad policy exist and persist?" Various schools of thought have answered that question, but I argue that the explanations, while correct, are incomplete. In this paper, I apply the expert failure literature to the problem of...

Price theory analysis teaches us that, as the cost of using markets rises (ie transaction costs), we will expect to see either higher prices in the market, lower activity, or some combination of the two. We have a natural experiment to test this hypothesis in water exchange markets in Colorado....

In a pandemic, citizens and policy makers must rely on expert opinion. What are the institutional arrangements that allow for the best advice to come forward? Using the framework established by Koppl (2018) on expert failure, we analyze the COVID-19 pandemic to see where missteps in expertise...