Within the last generation, economic analysis has produced a wealth of insights into common law principles and especially into the common law of tort. 1 Two distinct traditions have emerged within the economic approach to tort law. The normative tradition attempts to evaluate the economic desirability of liability rules with a view toward reforming them. In contrast, the positive tradition uses economic concepts to explain common law liability rules with a view toward gaining a better understanding of the rules themselves and of their social consequences.' The hypothesis t Associate Professor of Law, University of Iowa. I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and assistance of Wesley J. Liebeler, James E. Krier, and George L. Priest in writing this Article. I am also grateful to the participants of the several workshops at which I presented it: the Chicago Law and Economics Workshop, particularly Richard Posner, Richard Epstein, and William Landes; the Yale Law and Economics Workshop, particularly George Priest, Guido Calabresi, Alvin Klevorick, and Henry Hansmann; the Iowa Economics Workshop, particularly Donald McCloskey and John Kennan. Thanks are also due to those others who provided helpful comments on earlier drafts, particularly
BackgroundEconomists believe that barter is the ultimate cause of social wealth—and even much of our human culture—yet little is known about the evolution and development of such behavior. It is useful to examine the circumstances under which other species will or will not barter to more fully understand the phenomenon. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are an interesting test case as they are an intelligent species, closely related to humans, and known to participate in reciprocal interactions and token economies with humans, yet they have not spontaneously developed costly barter.Methodology/Principle FindingsAlthough chimpanzees do engage in noncostly barter, in which otherwise value-less tokens are exchanged for food, this lack of risk is not typical of human barter. Thus, we systematically examined barter in chimpanzees to ascertain under what circumstances chimpanzees will engage in costly barter of commodities, that is, trading food items for other food items with a human experimenter. We found that chimpanzees do barter, relinquishing lower value items to obtain higher value items (and not the reverse). However, they do not trade in all beneficial situations, maintaining possession of less preferred items when the relative gains they stand to make are small.Conclusions/SignificanceTwo potential explanations for this puzzling behavior are that chimpanzees lack ownership norms, and thus have limited opportunity to benefit from the gains of trade, and that chimpanzees' risk of defection is sufficiently high that large gains must be imminent to justify the risk. Understanding the conditions that support barter in chimpanzees may increase understanding of situations in which humans, too, do not maximize their gains.
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