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- Title
The Ecological and Civil Mainsprings of Property: An Experimental Economic History of Whalers’ Rules of Capture.
- Authors
Wilson, Bart J.; Jaworski, Taylor; Schurter, Karl E.; Smyth, Andrew
- 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.
- Subjects
PROPERTY -- Social aspects; WHALERS (Persons); LAW &; economics; CONDUCT of life -- Social aspects; EXPERIMENTS; PUFENDORF, Samuel, Freiherr von, 1632-1694; INTERPERSONAL relations &; culture; EXPERIMENTAL design; MANNERS &; customs
- Publication
Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, 2012, Vol 28, Issue 4, p617
- ISSN
8756-6222
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/jleo/ewr024