My Background

Erik Photo

I was born and raised in Johnson City, Tennessee. You may have heard about us in songs by Old Crow Medicine Show and Kenny Chesney. From 2003-2008 I went to college and grad school in and around Washington, DC, finished up my doctoral research in Orange, California in May 2010, and my wife Jill and I moved to Maastricht in August 2010. So far, European life is good.


My Publications

  • "Learning to Respect Property by Refashioning Theft into Trade." 2011. Experimental Economics, 14(1): 84-109.

  • "Heuristic Learning and the Discovery of Specialization and Exchange." 2011. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 35(4): 491-511.

  • "Geography and Social Networks in Nascent Distal Exchange." with Bart J. Wilson. Forthcoming. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics.

  • "Essays in the Emergence of Specialization, Exchange and Property." (2010) Ph.D. Dissertation.

  • "Exchange, Theft, and the Social Formation of Property." with Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. June 2010. 74: 206-229.

  • "Historical Property Rights, Sociality, and the Emergence of Impersonal Exchange in Long-distance Trade." with Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson. American Economic Review. June 2008. 98(3): 1009-1039.

  • "Building a Market: From Personal to Impersonal Exchange." with Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson, in Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, ed. Paul J. Zak. (2008) Princeton.


My Interests

Experimental Economics, Agent-Based Modeling, Institutional Economics, Property Rights, Conflict, Economic History