The Duel: Can These Gentlemen Be Acting Efficiently?

Schwartz, Warren F.; Baxter, Keith; Ryan, David P.

doi:10.1086/467744

Cited by 29 publications

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“…5 Schwartz, Baxter, and Ryan (1984), come closest to an efficiency explanation of dueling by recognizing that dueling played a role in facilitating social interactions by helping to enforce good reputations, but they also view 4. If viewed as a court substitute, dueling appears to be a particularly inefficient social norm since the metaphor fits so badly: ''The duel was like a lawsuit where the judge, after establishing that indeed there was a wrong, flips a coin to decide who, between the plaintiff and the defendant, should be executed for the wrong.…”

Section: Dueling Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…45 In contrast, Schwartz, Baxter, and Ryan (1984) claim that the fatality rate in U.S. pistol duels was 1 in 14, or slightly more than 7%. 46 In addition, American dueling was more common in the south than in the north.…”

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confidence: 97%

“…The early modern period was marked by extreme sensitivity in the perception of such offenses'' (p. 38). On the other hand, Schwartz, Baxter, and Ryan (1984), are right: ''The duel, in these [trivial] circumstances, may be viewed as a means for the two parties to demonstrate that, whatever the facts of the precipitating incident, they are in fact honorable people'' (p. 345).…”

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The Duel of Honor: Screening For Unobservable Social Capital

Allen¹,

Reed²

2006

American Law and Economics Review

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The duel of honor was a highly ritualized violent activity practiced (mostly) by aristocrats from about 1500 to 1900. The duel of honor was held in private, was attended by seconds and other members of society, was illegal, and often resulted from trivial incidents. Duels were fought according to strict codes, their lethality fell over time, and certain members of society were not allowed to duel. We argue dueling functioned as a screen for unobservable investments in social capital.Social capital was used during this period to support political transactions in an age when high civil service appointments were made through patronage. The screening hypothesis explains the puzzling features of the duel of honor, its rise and fall over time and locations, and the differences between European and American duels.In a state of highly polished society, an affront is held to be a serious injury. It must, therefore, be resented, or rather a duel must be fought upon it; as men have agreed to banish from their society one who puts up with an affront without fighting a duel.

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Section: Dueling Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 97%

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The Duel of Honor: Screening For Unobservable Social Capital

Allen¹,

Reed²

2006

American Law and Economics Review

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“…Inside international relations, the best work on duelling has been short and covered little space or time-not a single article has been devoted to the topic (Waltz 1959, 51-54;Wright 1983, 174-179;Mueller 1989, 9 -13). Outside international relations, the best work has had a limited purview and poor engagement with international relations theory (Clark 1958, chapter 2;Elster 1999, 203 -238;Schneider 1987;Schwartz et al 1984). Without cross-national, long-term comparisons, scholars have lacked critical information for assessing duelling's demise and its relation to war's abolition.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Duelling and the abolition of war

Parent

2009

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

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Political scientists have long compared war to duelling in the hope that war could be abolished like duelling, that is, at the hands of a normative campaign. However, there has been limited investigation of duelling's past. What can the history of duelling teach us about the future of war? This paper advances two arguments. First, by refining the conventional wisdom, it argues that duelling's demise was caused less by normative campaigning than by the timing of industrialization. Second, it argues that although duelling is not an analogous institution to modern war, its ancestor, feuding, is. Writings on feuds contribute a complementary literature to the limited data on war, which is helpful for thought experiments and hypothesis testing. Further, feuding's fall was caused more by the growth of state capacity than by normative campaigning. In sum, neither the history of duelling nor that of feuding confirms the view that ideational factors played the principal role in suppressing these practices; therefore, we should reconsider how the abolition of war might occur.

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“…In the best recent treatments of dueling, Greenberg (1990) and Morgan (1995) argue persuasively that duelists sought to defend their ''honor.'' Other scholars (Schwartz, Baxter, and Ryan 1984;Billacois 1990;Keiser 1990;Weber 1999) and contemporaries (Anon. 1830) make similar claims.…”

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The Deadliest of Games: The Institution of Dueling

Kingston

Wright

2010

Southern Economic Journal

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Recent historical research indicates that ritualistic dueling had a rational basis. Basically, under certain social and economic conditions, individuals must fight in order to maintain their personal credit and social standing. We use a repeated two-player sequential game with random matching to show how the institution of dueling could have functioned as a costly but incentive-compatible means by which individuals could demonstrate their good faith dealings by defending their ''honor.'' JEL Classification: C73, D02, N20

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The Duel: Can These Gentlemen Be Acting Efficiently?

Cited by 29 publications

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The Duel of Honor: Screening For Unobservable Social Capital

The Duel of Honor: Screening For Unobservable Social Capital

Duelling and the abolition of war

The Deadliest of Games: The Institution of Dueling

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