The Ecology of Trade

Brendan Moyle ()

Journal of Bioeconomics, 2000, vol. 2, issue 2, 139-152

Abstract: Trading behavior occurs in many species but has a particularly elaborate form in humans. Trade is defined as the mutually beneficial, adaptive transfer of goods and services between organisms. Trade has a competitive element and responds to changes in relative scarcity. Trade is demonstrated to be a biological phenomenon rather than an artefact of human civilisation. Species’ characteristics that increase the likelihood of trade occurring are outlined. The evolution of trading strategies is most likely in humans and social arthropods. A formal model is presented to show that trade can simultaneously increase consumption among populations and reduce pressure on locally scarce resources. This allows a species to increase its density and escape the constraints imposed by local resource limitations. This represents a major ecological benefit to the trading species. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000

Keywords: mutualism; resources; scarcity; social arthropods; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1011414717756 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:jbioec:v:2:y:2000:i:2:p:139-152

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10818/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1011414717756

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Bioeconomics is currently edited by Ulrich Witt, Michael T. Ghiselin and David Sloan Wilson

More articles in Journal of Bioeconomics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().