Abstract
Agent-based simulations and human-subject experiments explore the emergence of respect for property in a specialization and exchange economy with costless theft. Software agents, driven by reciprocity and hill-climbing heuristics and parameterized to replicate humans when property is exogenously protected, are employed to predict human behavior when property can be freely appropriated. Agents do not predict human behavior in a new set of experiments because subjects innovate, constructing a property convention of “mutual taking” in 5 out of the 6 experimental sessions that allows exchange to crowd out theft. When the same convention is made available to agents, they adopt it and again replicate human behavior. Property emerges as a social convention that exploits the capacity for reciprocity to sustain trade.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arifovic, J., & Ledyard, J. O. (2004). Scaling up learning models in public good games. Journal of Public Economic Theory, 6, 203–238.
Arthur, W. B. (1991). Designing economic agents that act like human agents: a behavioral approach to bounded rationality. The American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 81(2), 353–359.
Axelrod, R. (1997). The complexity of cooperation: agent-based models of competition and collaboration. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bengtsson, H. (2003). The R.oo package—object-oriented programming with references using standard R code. In K. Hornik, F. Leisch, & A. Zeilis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on distributed statistical computing. Vienna, Austria.
Bentham, J. (1802). The theory of legislation. London: Kegan Paul. C.K. Ogden (Ed.) (1931).
Berkelaar, M. et al. (2008). lpSolve: interface to Lp_solve v. 5.5 to solve linear/integer programs. R package version 5.6.4.
Bernhard, H., Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2006). Group affiliation and altruistic norm enforcement. American Economic Review, 96(2), 217–221.
Bloor, D. (2002). Wittgenstein, rules and institutions. New York: Routledge.
Buckle, S. (1991). Natural law and the theory of property: Grotius to Hume. Oxford: Clarendon.
Crockett, S., Smith, V. L., & Wilson, B. J. (2009). Exchange and specialisation as a discovery process. Economic Journal, 119(539), 1162–1188.
Duffy, J. (2001). Learning to speculate: experiments with artificial and real agents. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 25, 295–319.
Fehr, E., & Gachter, S. (2000). Fairness and retaliation: the economics of reciprocity. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(3), 159–181.
Henningsen, A. (2008). micEcon: Microeconomics. R package version 0.5-6.
Howitt, P., & Clower, R. (2000). The emergence of economic organization. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 41, 55–84.
Hume, D. (2000). A treatise of human nature (1740). New York: Oxford University Press.
Kimbrough, E. O. (forthcoming). Heuristic learning and the discovery of specialization and exchange. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
Kimbrough, E. O., Smith, V. L., & Wilson, B. J. (2010). Exchange, theft, and the social formation of property. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 74, 206–229.
Levine, D. K. (1998). Modeling altruism and spitefulness in experiments. Review of Economic Dynamics, 1(3), 593–622.
Levine, R. (2005). Law, endowments, and property rights. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(3), 61–88.
Neuwirth, E. (2007). RColorBrewer: ColorBrewer palettes. R package version 1.0-2.
R Development Core Team (2010). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. ISBN 3-900051-07-0. http://www.R-project.org.
Skyrms, B. (2004). The stag hunt and the evolution of social structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, V. L. (1974). Experimental economics: induced value theory. The American Economic Review, 66(2), 274–279.
Smith, V. L. (1982). Microeconomic systems as an experimental science. The American Economic Review, 72(5), 923–955.
Warnes, G. R., Bolker, B., & Lumley, T. (2008). gtools: various R programming tools. R package version 2.5.0.
Westermarck, E. (1908). The origin and development of the moral ideas. Whitefish: Kessinger (2007).
Wyman, K. M. (2005). From fur to fish: reconsidering the evolution of private property. New York University Law Review, 80, 117–240.
Young, H. P. (1993). The evolution of conventions. Econometrica, 61(1), 57–84.
Young, H. P. (1996). The economics of convention. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10(2), 105–122.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Data, simulation code, and CSW experiment instructions available upon request. All simulations, data analysis, and figures were performed or created in R: A language and Environment for Statistical Computing (R Development Core Team 2010) with assistance from various contributed packages including: Bengtsson (2003), Berkelaar et al. (2008), Henningsen (2008), Neuwirth (2007), and Warnes et al. (2008).
Electronic Supplementary Material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
About this article
Cite this article
Kimbrough, E.O. Learning to respect property by refashioning theft into trade. Exp Econ 14, 84–109 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-010-9258-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-010-9258-0