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  The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

  Bart J. Wilson

  "Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human custom. Integrating cognitive linguistics with philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, the book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. That is, all human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist."

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  Foreword to Relativizing Newton

  Vernon L. Smith

  A foreword to Ramzi Suleiman's book Relativizing Newton.

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  Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century

  Vernon Smith and Bart J. Wilson

  Sometime in the last 250 years, economists lost sight of the full range of human feeling, thinking, and knowing in everyday life. Smith and Wilson show how Adam Smith's model of sociality can re-humanize twenty-first century economics by undergirding it with sentiments, fellow feeling, and a sense of propriety - the stuff of which human relationships are built. Integrating insights from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations into contemporary empirical analysis, this book shapes economic betterment as a science of human beings.

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  Islamic Law and Economic Development

  Jared Rubin

  "This chapter discusses the connection between Islamic law and economic development in the historic and contemporary Middle East. I make the case that Islamic law has had a detrimental impact on Middle Eastern economic growth for two related reasons. The first is that there are elements of Islamic doctrine which make Islam conducive to legitimizing political rule. This entails that Muslim rulers have historically given religious authorities a seat at the bargaining table over laws and policies. Secondly, this is problematic for economic growth because until recently rulers gave the clerical class purview over commercial law. Islamic law addresses many elements of business, including laws of partnership, trusts, lending, and finance. Most of these laws were formed in a pre-modern economic context and are thus not conducive to supporting business in a changing economic environment."

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  Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not

  Jared Rubin

  For centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe. Yet, the modern economy was born in Europe. Why was it not born in the Middle East? In this book Jared Rubin examines the role that Islam played in this reversal of fortunes. It argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the primary culprit. Muslim religious authorities were given an important seat at the political bargaining table, which they used to block important advancements such as the printing press and lending at interest. In Europe, however, the Church played a weaker role in legitimizing rule, especially where Protestantism spread (indeed, the Reformation was successful due to the spread of printing, which was blocked in the Middle East). It was precisely in those Protestant nations, especially England and the Dutch Republic, where the modern economy was born.

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  Financing California Real Estate: Spanish Missions to Subprime Mortgages

  Lynne Doti

  California was at the epicentre of the collapse of the real estate market in 2008, which had a devastating effect on the world economy. Taking this diverse and powerful state as a case study, this book presents a financial history of the property business, from the time Spanish Missions were established to the Great Recession.

  Financing California Real Estate provides the history of expansions and contractions in the real estate market, and describes factors in the state and nation which may have triggered changes in the direction of growth in real estate lending. It explores how financial institutions which provided funding for building and buying homes changed over time, from the establishment of Spanish Missions in 1769, to the Gold Rush, to rail transportation, all the way through to the real estate bubble that peaked in 2005. Using detailed information on financial institutions to explain the changing nature of the real estate market, this book ultimately suggests an alternative theory for what led to the Great Recession.

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  Banking in an Unregulated Environment: California 1879-1905

  Lynne Doti

  The chapter looks into the financial sector of the American economy.

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  An Optimistic Theory of Exhaustible Resources

  Vernon L. Smith

  Smith proposes substitutes for exhaustible natural resources.

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  Littering, Derelicts, and the Pricing System

  Vernon L. Smith

  This chapter focuses looks at the effects of littering and how it factors into the pricing system.

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  Timur Kuran’s Framework and Economic Underdevelopment in the Islamic World

  Jared Rubin

  This essay focuses on what I believe to be some of the most important insights of Timur Kuran’s corpus of writings on the economics of Islam. In Kuran’s first seminal piece on this topic, “Islam and Underdevelopment: An Old Puzzle Revisited” (1997), he lays out the question which has consumed much of his academic life since: “Why has the Islamic world been economically underdeveloped for the past few centuries relative to the West despite being ahead for so long following the spread of Islam?” Kuran has answered this important question in numerous articles and a groundbreaking book (Kuran 2011) by focusing on the pathways through which economic stagnation occurred in the Middle East and North Africa. All of these answers have one common theme, which I believe is the most important insight that Kuran provides: all of the legal, political, and institutional phenomena which have been at the core of underdevelopment in the Islamic world were at one point in history optimal solutions to some economic exigency.

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  Conflicts with Multiple Battlefields

  Dan Kovenock and Brian Roberson

  This paper examines conflicts in which performance is measured by the players' success or failure in multiple component conflicts, commonly termed 'battlefields'. In multi-battlefield conflicts, behavioral linkages across battlefields depend both on the technologies of conflict within each battlefield and the nature of economies or diseconomies in how battlefield out-comes and costs aggregate in determining payoffs in the overall conflict.

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  Banking Industry

  Lynne Doti

  "As formal business institutions, banks emerged very slowly during nineteenth-century Indian Territory but quickly appeared with the land runs that populated central and western Oklahoma Territory. As occurred during the early settlement periods of other states, in Oklahoma local merchants often performed the role of banker during the territorial era. In the 1870s, for example, James J. McAlester in Indian Territory (I.T.) provided farmers, coal miners, and other residents banking services from his mercantile store. In Doaksville, Choctaw Nation, I.T., competition occurred between the Doak and Times Mercantile Company and the Berthelet, Heald, and Company, both of which performed banking functions. In 1873 James A. Patterson established the Patterson Mercantile Company in Muskogee, I.T., where he provided a safe for out-of-town customers, especially wealthy cattlemen who traveled with large amounts of currency in canvas bags. He eventually established a bank that offered passbook and checking accounts."

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  Penn Square Bank

  Lynne Doti

  This article looks into the failure of Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City and the devastating effect on the U.S. banking system when the bank was declared insolvent on July 5, 1982.

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  American Entrepreneur: The Fascinating Stories of the People who Defined Business in the United States

  Larry Schweikart and Lynne Doti

  Ever since the first colonists landed in 'The New World', Americans have forged ahead in their quest to make good on the promises of capitalism and independence. This book vividly illustrates the history of business in the United States from the point of view of the enterprising men and women who made it happen. Weaving together vivid narrative with economic analysis, "American Entrepreneur" recounts fascinating successes and failures, including: how Eli Whitney changed the shape of the American business landscape; the impact of the Civil War on the economy and the subsequent dominance of Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan; the rise of the consumer marketplace led by Asa Candler, W. K. Kellogg, Henry Ford, and J.C. Penny; and, Warren Buffett's, Michael Milken's, and even Martha Stewart's experience in the 'New Economy' of the 1990s and into today. It is an adventure to start a business, and the greatest risk takers in that adventure are entrepreneurs. This is the epic story of America's entrepreneurs and the economy they created.

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  Lessons from Neuroeconomics from the Law

  Kevin McCabe, Vernon L. Smith, and Terrence Chorvat

  This collection of essays explores the most relevant developments at the interface of economics and psychology, giving special attention to models of irrational behavior, and draws the relevant implications of such models for the design of legal rules and institutions. The application of economic models of irrational behavior to law is especially challenging because specific departures from rational behavior differ markedly from one another.

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  Lessons From Neuroeconomics for the Law

  Vernon L. Smith, Terrence Chorvat, and Kevin McCabe

  This chapter focuses on human behavior and its relationship to economics.

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  What Makes Trade Possible?

  Vernon L. Smith, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Kevin McCabe

  This chapter provides a framework for understanding the difference between trade that takes place between partners and trade between anonymous strangers.

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  On Software Piracy

  Sougata Poddar

  The pervasiveness of the illegal copying of software is indeed a worldwide phenomenon. Economists argue that when the piracy takes place at the end-users' level, the original software developer finds it profitable to allow limited piracy when the effect of network externality is reasonably strong in the users market. We argue when the piracy is of retail in nature, the same logic cannot be extended as the reason for piracy and show that it is always optimal for the original software developer to protect its software even when the effect of network externality is reasonably strong in the end-users' market. We suggest that piracy depends more on fundamental issues like demand environment, market structure, nature of piracy and nature of competition. The other issue we cover here is the economic impact of piracy on the welfare of a society. We discuss various policy implications on regulating piracy in developing as well as developed markets.

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  Monetary Rewards and Decision Cost in Strategic Interactions

  Vernon L. Smith and Ferenc Szidarovsky

  A testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon.

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  Banking in the Western United States

  Lynne Doti

  In the early frontier years, private individuals and outposts of the Hudson Bay Company and other trading companies provided banking services. As states west of the Mississippi began developing after the 1840s, capital flowed fairly readily from the east coast and also from foreign sources. This is particularly true of California. Gold was discovered in early 1848, and the population exploded. San Francisco and Sacramento quickly became cities. By 1852, numerous banks representing investors from St. Louis, Boston, New York and even other countries were operating in San Francisco. Lazard Freres, a French bank, has remained there to the present time. St. Louis, an earlier financial center of the west, and New York banks were well represented until the mid-1850s, when a bank panic forced the reevaluation of distant branches or subsidiaries. As California grew, spurred at first by gold production and then by the Nevada silver discoveries in the1860s, San Francisco became the financial center of the western states.

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  Experimental Asset Markets

  Gunduz Caginalp, David P. Porter, and Vernon L. Smith

  This experiment focuses on the time evolution of trading periods, prices, and volume.

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  Property Rights as a Natural Order: Reciprocity, Evolutionary and Experimental Considerations

  Vernon L. Smith

  This chapter focuses on property rights of the individual.

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  Experimental Price Bubbles

  Vernon L. Smith

  This chapter looks at experimental markets and evaluates the expectation people have of their assets.

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  Humankind in Prehistory: Economy, Ecology and Institutions

  Vernon L. Smith

  This essay is about who we were in prehistory and how we were shaped by economic principles.

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  Notes on the Effect of Capital Gains Taxation on Non-Austrian Assets

  Dan Kovenock and Michael Rothschild

  This paper is an attempt to assess the effect of capital gains taxation on non-Austrian assets, such as claims to profits of continuing enterprises. As compared to taxation on an accrual basis, the capital gains tax discourages sales of appreciated assets. This is the "lock-in" effect. Because assets subject to capital gains taxation are generally held a long time, conventional estimates suggest that the effective rate of capital gains taxation is low. We contend that conventional estimates could seriously underestimate the effective rate of capital gains taxation because they ignore uncertainty. We construct a model which allows us to calculate the value of being able to actively manage a portfolio and use this model to calculate the effective rate of capital gains taxation. For several plausible parameter values the effective rate is significantly higher than estimates under certainty. We also discuss some of the ways in which the lock-in effect may distort the allocation of investment funds and the efficient workings of the capital market.