Bart Wilson Bart Wilson

On Explaining Why the (Human) World is Rich

European Economic Review, Volume 174, May 2025, 104969.

The wealth of the modern world is a natural historical marvel.  Explaining it has traditionally been the purview of economic historians, as exemplified by the recent book How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin.  But economic historians tend to only ask process-oriented “how” questions and “by what means” questions of the Great Enrichment. The eight co-authors of Explaining Technology, who are not economic historians, engage in the debate asking a different question.  Their goal is to explain the exponential shape of our enrichment with a model of the combinatorial evolution of technology.  With an eye toward how we ask questions of the Great Enrichment, I propose broadening our inquiries to include questions typically overlooked in modern economic science, namely, “What form does it take? and “For what purpose?”

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Bart Wilson Bart Wilson

Sympathy with Resentment: Willingness to Report Criminal Behavior Depends on the Punishment

Public Choice, forthcoming, with Jason Aimone, Lucas Rentschler, and Vernon Smith.

Adam Smith’s theory of justice holds that the appropriate punishment for a misdeed is determined, in part, by the sympathy elicited on behalf of the victim. Specifically, Smith states that: “…our first approbation of punishment is not founded upon the regard to public utility…it is our sympathy with the resentment of the sufferer…” (Smith, 1978: 475). To demonstrate his point, Smith relates an anecdote in which civilians were unwilling to report wrongdoing because the offender’s punishment was far too extreme. In this paper, we employ a laboratory experiment to investigate whether the willingness to report a crime diminishes when the severity of the punishment is dramatically elevated. Our findings reveal, as predicted by Smith, that a steep increase in the severity of the punishment indeed reduces the likelihood of individuals reporting offenders. Interestingly, that effect is not foreseen by potential offenders, who, in response to the more severe expected punishment, reduce their propensities to commit offenses.

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Bart Wilson Bart Wilson

The Symbolic Work of Prices

Review of Austrian Economics, 37(2), June 2024, with Akash Miharia and Jan Osborn. (Lead article)

We posit that prices are signs, not just signals, that work in the same symbolic way as words. Both are complex, generative systems of meaning shared in human societies that rely on a web of intricate symbolic references. Just like the meaning of a word is a product of our social and linguistic action, the meaning of a price is a product of our relationship to the physical world phenomena of people in markets for goods and services. The fundamental conception of both is to communicate and construct worlds with ourselves and others, enabling us to act in the world. Prices, like words, do symbolic work.

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Bart Wilson Bart Wilson

Territory in the State of Nature

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 219, March 2024, with Jordan Adamson.

In this paper we examine territorial behavior in the ecological conditions that foster conflict. We develop an economic model that isolates the effects of resource skew on territorial ranges, as well as their interactions with unequal appropriation abilities. We then conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to test the predictions of our model and find that observed behavior tends to cluster around the equilibrium predictions and that all comparative statics have the predicted sign. Additionally, we find that equally strong appropriators select more exclusive and less overlapping ranges than what is predicted with symmetric resources, while weaker appropriators choose more engulfed ranges than what is predicted with skewed resources.

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Bart Wilson Bart Wilson

The Primacy of Property; Or, The Subordination of Property Rights

Journal of Institutional Economics, 19(2), April 2023.

A property right, the standard view maintains, is a proper subset of the most complete and comprehensive set of incidents for full ownership of a thing. The subsidiary assumption is that the pieces that are property rights compose the whole that is ownership or property, i.e., that property rights explain property. In reversing the standard view I argue that (1) a custom of intelligent and meaningful human action explains property and that (2) as a custom, property is a historical process of selecting actions conditional on the context. My task is to explain how a physical world of human bodies with minds that feel, think, know, and want gives rise to a custom of property with meaning and purpose. Property is primary because ideas are primary.

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Bart Wilson Bart Wilson

Rule-Following

in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, C.M. Melenovsky (ed.), Routledge, 2022, with Erik Kimbrough.

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ScienceSites ScienceSites

Experimental Methods and Antitrust Policy

In Research in Experimental Economics: Experiments Investigating Market Power, Vol. 9, R. M. Isaac and C. Holt (eds.), JAI (Elsevier Science), 2002, with Douglas D. Davis.

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