Ownership and Trade from Evolutionary Games

Ownership and trade emerge from anarchy as evolutionary stable strategies. In these evolutionary game models, ownership status provides an endogenous asymmetrizing criterion enabling cheaper resolution of property conflicts. †Assistant Professor, Columbia University, 615 Uris Hall, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY 10027. The author acknowledges financial support from the Brown and Bain Fellowship in Law and High Technology, the John M. Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics at Stanford Law School, and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School. www.columbia.edu/~kky2001