IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v13y1997i1p202-31.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Trade without Law: Private-Order Institutions in Mexican California

Author

Listed:
  • Clay, Karen

Abstract

Trade prospered in absence of law in California during the 1830s and 1840s. Merchants, through intermerchant trade and the partnerships they organized to buy goods abroad, played a central role in trade. This article examines the private-order institution that facilitated intermerchant trade. The hypothesis is that a particular type of private-order institution, a coalition, a reputation mechanism mitigated the commitment problem inherent in having individuals handle goods that they did not own by linking a merchant's past behavior and his future payoff. Evidence from the merchants' business correspondence supports the hypothesis. A game-theoretic model of a coalition is presented. The model provides insight into the punishment merchants imposed on cheaters, the expansion of the coalition in the 1830s, and its collapse around the time of the gold rush in 1848-1849. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Clay, Karen, 1997. "Trade without Law: Private-Order Institutions in Mexican California," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 13(1), pages 202-231, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:13:y:1997:i:1:p:202-31
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:oup:jleorg:v:13:y:1997:i:1:p:202-31. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    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.