T his study reports findings from the first large-scale experiment investigating whether entrepreneurs differ from other people in their willingness to expose themselves to various forms of uncertainty. A stratified random sample of 700 chief executive officers from the Yangzi delta region in China is compared to 200 control group members. Our findings suggest that in economic decisions, entrepreneurs are more willing to accept strategic uncertainty related to multilateral competition and trust. However, entrepreneurs do not differ from ordinary people when it comes to nonstrategic forms of uncertainty, such as risk and ambiguity.

This paper investigates if economic theory can explain variations in piracy behavior between individuals and between countries. It is demonstrated that economic theory explains a notable part of the individual variation in a survey study. Individuals with a low net valuation of an original when a copy is available are more prone to engage in piracy than individuals with a higher valuation. Individuals with a low cost of obtaining and handling copies are also more engaged in piracy. The country-wise variation can also be explained by economic variables; GNI/capita and judicial efficiency explain a substantial part of this variation.

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This paper emphasizes that rights facilitate decentralized use of information and computation. A dynamically efficient adjustment process that solves a private information linear resource allocation problem by a sequential auction of production and trading rights is presented. It is shown that in equilibrium the sequential auction mimics the simplex algorithm in a decentralized way and thereby gives it an institutional economic interpretation, where the structure of rights imposes restrictions on the problem sequentially.Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. (A.N. Whitehead (1911, p. 61))