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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Violence, Access, And Competition In The Market For Protection, Adam Smith
Violence, Access, And Competition In The Market For Protection, Adam Smith
Economics Department Faculty Publications & Research
We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that “peasants” have to violence-empowered “elites”. The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites price and operate their protective services to peasants, and to observe the degree to which elites engage in wealth-destroying violence in competition amongst each other for wealth generating peasants. We find that greater access to peasants strikingly increases violence among the elites, but with limited access the elites markedly extract more tribute from the peasants. Our findings are …
Cognitive Systems For Revenge And Forgiveness, Michael E. Mccullough, Robert Kurzban, Benjamin A. Tabak
Cognitive Systems For Revenge And Forgiveness, Michael E. Mccullough, Robert Kurzban, Benjamin A. Tabak
ESI Publications
Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems (including homicide, bodily harm, theft, mate poaching, cuckoldry, reputational damage, sexual aggression, and the infliction of these costs on one's offspring, mates, coalition partners, or friends). One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in …