There are four ways to get what you want: receive it as a gift, make it, take it, or trade for it.
Institutions, the rules of the game, make some of these paths attractive and others costly. That simple insight unlocks puzzles across wildly different domains.
I use this framework to uncover cause and effect in social life. On this site, you'll find me pondering why some goods exchange by the unit and others by the pound, or why buyers are sometimes willing to purchase sight unseen—a so-called pig in a poke. I also apply the same lens to pressing public policy problems, like what follows from restricting exchange across borders.
I'm an Associate Professor of Economics in the Winklevoss School of Business at Grove City College and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. My academic research, which draws on market process, property rights, and public choice traditions, has appeared in the Journal of Business Venturing (Best Paper of 2022), Public Choice, and the International Review of Law and Economics. But much of my work reaches beyond the academy. Through my books No Free Lunch and Mere Economics, my blog Marginalia, and writing in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and elsewhere, I invite curious readers and skeptics alike to embrace the economic point of view.
Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.