When
3:30 – 5 p.m., Sept. 16, 2026
Where
McClelland Hall Rm. 401KK
Presentation from Randy Hill, PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics.
PAPER TOPIC: Theft, Trade, and Social Order
ASTRACT: In the absence of institutions that protect property rights, what conditions allow trade to emerge among self-interested individuals capable of violence? This paper studies a production economy in which individuals can trade peacefully or appropriate goods through conflict. In this environment, Conflict is the default interaction. Peaceful trade can arise only when the distribution of economic goods matches the distribution of coercive power. Because decentralized economic activity provides no mechanism ensuring this alignment, the conditions necessary for peaceful trade arise only by happenstance.
Conflict also creates incentives for organization. Players can increase the joint returns of a group by specializing in either production of consumption goods or coercion. Organization is constrained, however, by the coercive outside options of its members: a player participates only when the benefits of organization exceed what the player can obtain operating alone. Interestingly, organizations cannot sustain Trade because specialization makes theft more attractive to coercive specialists than continued participation.
Transfers can resolve the distributive incompatibility between Conflict and Trade. A transfer schedule that compensates players according to their coercive power can make peaceful exchange as rewarding as theft. The existence of such a transfer schedule, however, establishes the feasibility rather than the implementation of peaceful exchange: without an institution capable of implementing the transfers, the underlying enforcement problem remains.
Contacts
Veda Adams