Historical Property Rights, Sociality, and the Emergence of Impersonal Exchange in Long-distance Trade
Erik Kimbrough,
Vernon Smith () and
Bart Wilson
No 1003, Working Papers from George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science
Abstract:
This laboratory experiment explores the extent to which impersonal exchange emerges from personal exchange with opportunities for long-distance trade. We design a three-commodity production and exchange economy in which agents in three geographically separated villages must develop multilateral exchange networks to import a third good only available abroad. For treatments, we induce two distinct institutional histories to investigate how past experience with property rights affects the evolution of specialization and exchange. We find that a history of un-enforced property rights hinders our subjects¡¯ ability to develop the requisite personal social arrangements necessary to support specialization and effectively exploit impersonal long-distance trade.
Keywords: personal exchange; impersonal exchange; long-distance trade; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D23 D51 F10 N70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2006-10, Revised 2006-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.gmu.edu/schools/chss/economics/icesworkingpapers.gmu.edu/pdf/1003.pdf Latest version, 2006 (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Historical Property Rights, Sociality, and the Emergence of Impersonal Exchange in Long-Distance Trade (2008) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gms:wpaper:1003
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shams Bahabib ().