IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v67y2007i04p944-967_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Information Sharing During the Klondike Gold Rush

Author

Listed:
  • Allen, Douglas W.

Abstract

When George Carmack struck gold in the Yukon territory on 17 August 1896, he freely shared the details and started what would eventually be three waves of rushes. This reflected a social norm of the Klondike, namely that any miner who struck gold would share this information. Miners did not behave this way in other nineteenth-century gold rushes. The article's hypothesis is that the extreme mining conditions and local geography of the Yukon led to very secure property rights over mining claims. Therefore, it took only a small incentive payment to induce miners to act in the social interest.

Suggested Citation

  • Allen, Douglas W., 2007. "Information Sharing During the Klondike Gold Rush," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 67(4), pages 944-967, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:67:y:2007:i:04:p:944-967_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050707000459/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John R. Boyce & Diane P. Bischak, 2010. "Learning by Doing, Knowledge Spillovers, and Technological and Organizational Change in High-Altitude Mountaineering," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 11(5), pages 496-532, October.
    2. Edwyna Harris, 2011. "Does franchise extension reduce short-run economic growth? Evidence from New South Wales, 1862-1882," Monash Economics Working Papers 19-11, Monash University, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:67:y:2007:i:04:p:944-967_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.