The Ecological and Civil Mainsprings of Property: An Experimental Economic History of Whalers’ Rules of Capture
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2012
Abstract
This article uses a laboratory experiment to probe the proposition that property emerges anarchically out of social custom. We test the hypothesis that whalers in the 18th and 19th centuries developed rules of conduct that minimized the sum of the transaction and production costs of capturing their prey, the primary implication being that different ecological conditions led to different rules of capture. Ceteris paribus, we find that simply imposing two different types of prey is insufficient to observe two different rules of capture. Another factor is essential, namely, as Samuel Pufendorf theorized over 300 years ago, that the members of the community are civil minded (JEL C92, D23, K11, N50).
Recommended Citation
Wilson, B., Jaworski, T., Schurter, K., and Smyth, A. “The Ecological and Civil Mainsprings of Property: An Experimental Economic History of Whalers’ Rules of Capture,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 28(4), October, 2012.
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Comments
Awarded the 2012 Oliver E. Williamson prize for best article for all papers accepted in 2011.
This article was originally published in Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, volume 28, issue 4, in 2012.
The link above is to the authoritative publisher’s version, as noted by the Economic Science Institute, and may reside behind a paywall.