The Ecological and Civil Mainsprings of Property: An Experimental Economic History of Whalers’ Rules of Capture

Bart Wilson, Taylor Jaworski, Karl Schurter () and Andrew Smyth ()
Additional contact information
Karl Schurter: Department of Economics, University of Virginia
Andrew Smyth: Department of Economics, Florida State University

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: This paper 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 century 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 lead to different rules of capture. Holding everything else constant, we find that simply imposing two different types of prey is insufficient to observe two different rules of capture. Another factor is essential, namely that the members of the community are civil-minded.

Keywords: property rights; endogenous rules; whaling; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D23 K11 N50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2010-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-his and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chapman.edu/ESI/wp/Wilson_Whaling.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Ecological and Civil Mainsprings of Property: An Experimental Economic History of Whalers' Rules of Capture (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:10-12

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