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In the absence of capable government services, a railroad company in Texas and multiple cotton mills in North Carolina successfully prevented malaria in the early twentieth century. This Article looks through the lens of economics to understand how and why people had the incentive to privately coordinate malaria prevention during this time, but not after. These firms, motivated by increases in productivity and profit, implemented extensive anti-malaria programs and used their hierarchical organizational structures to monitor performance. The factors underlying the decline of private prevention include a fall in the overall rate of malaria, the increasing presence of the federal government, and technological innovations that lowered exposure to mosquitoes. Understanding how, why, and when firms can prevent diseases has important implications for current disease policy, especially where governments, international organizations, and technologies are not enough.

At their arrival in North America, travelers from the Old Continent were exposed to a radically different civilization. Among the many practices that captured their imagination was scalp-taking. During a battle, the Native American warrior would often stop after having killed or subdued the enemy and cut off his scalp. In this article, we develop an economic theory of this gruesome practice. We argue that scalp-taking constituted an institutional solution to the problem of monitoring warriors’ behavior in the battlefield under conditions of high information costs.

The response many gay men took to the HIV epidemic in the United States was largely informal, especially given distant state and federal governments. The condom code, a set of informal norms that encouraged the use of condoms, is one instance of this informal response, which was wholly uncoordinated. Yet, it is not clear why these informal norms emerged or why they have since eroded. This paper explores how gay men in particular generated expectations and normative beliefs regarding condom usage, which helped to establish the condom code as an informal norm. Furthermore, the erosion of the condom code is viewed as a result of changing expectations, which change as bio-medical means of HIV treatment and prevention develop and as online and digital communities facilitate serosorting, all of which provide alternatives to condoms as a means of prevention and their associated informal norms. Future HIV prevention campaigns should recognize the extent to which informal norms coordinate and encourage preventative behavior, as well as how beliefs and expectations alter the informal norms people adopt.

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