Man has developed rules of conduct not because he knows but because he does not know what all the consequences of a particular action will be.

–F.A. Hayek

As a summer scholar in the IFREE-Sponsored Summer Scholar Program, Bradley Sherwood worked on research with Summer Scholar mentors, Drs. Bart Wilson and Jan Osborn of Chapman University. This led to the publication entitled, “Conduct in narrativized trust games,” published in the Southern Economic Journal, where the above quote is found in the abstract. Continue Reading →

Feb. 2010

Dr. Bart Wilson of Chapman University, with Dr. Artie Zillante at UNC Charlotte, published “More Information, More Ripoffs: Experiments with Public and Private Information in Markets with Asymmetric Information”, as the lead article in the Review of Industrial Organization’s February issue.

Models of markets for used cars predict that sellers can pawn off lemons on trusting buyers. However, in a laboratory experiment Profs. Wilson and Zillante find stark evidence that sellers cannot pawn off lemons on buyers when transaction prices are private. Only when transaction prices are public can owners of lemons successfully masquerade as sellers of high quality goods. Artie is a former IFREE-assisted post doc at GMU.