Understanding Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock was rational to a fault, and he tried to insist that others be fully rational, confronting all with any inconsistency in their thinking. He loved to be shocking. He was also quite generous. Tullock’s willingness to take a chance, as editor of Public Choice, on a paper that he did not understand led to the publication of the most widely cited paper ever published in the journal.     

Remembering Gordon Tullock

This is a short tribute to Gordon Tullock, and the unique approach to bioeconomic issues that he took. The example used is hoarding behavior by various species of squirrels.     

Gordon Tullock and Richard McKenzie. The New World of Economics.

The authors extend the literature on the efficacy of high school economics instruction in two directions. First, they assess how much economic knowledge that California students acquired in their compulsory high school course is retained on their entering college. Second, using as a control group some college students from the state of Washington, where there is no mandate for high school economics instruction, the authors evaluate the impact of California's high school economics mandate on students’ economic literacy when they enter college. The testing instrument is the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL).     

The memorable Gordon Tullock

During my visit over 1978-9 to VPI, I got to know Gordon Tullock and his colleagues James Buchanan, Geoff Brennan, and David Friedman well, having meals frequently. I learned from these eloquent debaters a lot in many ways.     

Gordon Tullock: economic gadfly

This article discusses Gordon Tullock’s impact on the economics profession and on public choice in particular. It measures this impact through his publications, his editorship of the journal Public Choice, and his association with the Center for Public Choice.     

Gordon Tullock and experimental public choice

In this paper, I discuss Gordon Tullock’s views on Experimentation in Economics, his own research experiment, and his influence on the field of experimental public choice. I argue that Tullock can credibly claim to have been an early supporter of the method and that his work is cited more often than that of other public choice scholars active in the same period. His work on rent seeking forms the basis of an extensive experimental literature and studies on trust, demand revelation and voter turnout have been strongly influenced by Tullock’s work.     

Fond memories of professor Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock made lasting contribution to the economic notion of cost, while his criticism of the adversarial process in common law has generated recurring research into the efficiency of alternative legal systems.     

Gordon Tullock as a teacher and mentor

Gordon Tullock was involved in this former graduate student’s life as a dissertation advisor, writing instructor, mentor, and person offering lifelong encouragement. Although my direction was not in public choice, Gordon Tullock has remained a positive influence on everything I have done.     

On the extraordinary scholarly life and times of Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock, who passed away at the age of 92 on November 3, 2014, ranks justly near the top of the list of the “founding fathers” of the public choice research program. Most widely known in the academy as coauthor of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962), Professor Tullock was not named, unfairly in our joint opinion, as co-recipient of James Buchanan’s 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. A good case nevertheless can be made that Gordon earned Nobel laurels on his own account for groundbreaking contributions to the literatures on, among other topics of scholarly study, rent seeking, autocracy, bureaucracy, war and revolution, law and economics and bio-economics. This essay celebrates Gordon Tullock’s major influences on the field of public choice, including his launching of Public Choice, the journal for which both of us have served as editors, and his impacts on scholars working at the many and obviously fruitful intersections of economics and political science.     

Reminiscences of James Buchanan and the Virginia School

These are my personal reflections on James Buchanan and the development of the Virginia School.     

论法经济学建立的经济学基础

法经济学体系的建立,依赖于两大理论作基础,一是经济学理论,二是法理学基础。在经济学方面,古典自由主义的经济学说为法经济学提供了思想武器,新古典经济学为法经济学提供了重要的理论基础,新制度经济学则直接为法经济学提供了方法论基础。     

法经济学：法学和经济学半个世纪的学科交叉和融合发展

法经济学至今已经走过了近半个世纪,法经济学的发展不仅表现为经济学与法学的跨学科交融和经济学的研究范式对传统法学的巨大冲击与整合,也表现为其对司法实践的重要影响。文章通过对这一研究领域文献资料的整理,梳理出了学科发展的理论脉络和演化逻辑,可以为国内研究者的法经济学规范化和本土化的理论探索提供线索。首先,文章在对法经济学理论与实践的回顾与总结基础上,对该学科的性质、基本理论及研究方法做一简单的描述与总结;然后,选择法经济学研究中最重要且最受关注的财产、合同、侵权及犯罪四个领域,对其国内外研究现状,尤其对20世纪80年代后,国内学者对法经济学在中国的本土化研究加以详细的梳理与评述;最后,在对法经济学的成就与不足的总结与评述基础上,结合20世纪90年代后法经济学的学科演变趋势,提出了对法经济学未来发展趋势的基本判断。     

法经济学的现实主义溯源

第一次法经济学运动是从两奈主线展开的：旧制度经济学和法学现实主义。从进步主义时代的经济学家对经济学自由主义的批判,到旧制度经济学对经济学形式主义的攻击,都凸显了对现实的关注和制度的探究。康芒斯对“财产”与“财产权利”的区分及对“交易”概念的一般化为科斯的交易成本理论和科斯定理架起制度和交易成本、新古典理论和法律经济学之间的桥梁提供了基础;对现实主义法学来说,无论是霍姆斯的“法律的生命是行动,而不是逻辑”的主张,还是庞德提出的“书本上的法”与“行动中的法”差异的观点都着眼于瓦解和攻击法学教条主义和形式主义的法学自足性,从而努力弥合法律理论和法律实践的鸿沟。其价值在于引入外在的视角来研究法律,从而使得经济学有可能成为法学分析中有力的外在视角。     

Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics

Conclusions The Austrian tradition is identified by an built upon praxeology—the application of deductive reasoning to the irrefutable fact of human action. This method is the red thread that runs from Menger to B?hm-Bawerk to Mises to Murray Rothbard and the modern practitioners of Austrian economics. Working within this tradition, economists have produced a great edifice of irrefutable, universally applicable economic theory. They have shown how the free market advances mankind in its struggle against scarcity and why socialism cannot do so. They have taught us that we must choose one of these two social arrangements, since no system exists between them. We must make our selection and advance, by education and persuasion, either capitalism or socialism. Let us choose wisely.     

The Law and Economics of Costly Contracting

In most of the contract theory literature, contracting costsare assumed either to be high enough to preclude certain formsof contracting or low enough to permit any contract to be written.Similarly researchers usually treat renegotiation as eithercostless or prohibitively costly. This article addresses themiddle ground between these extremes, in which the costs ofcontracting and renegotiation can take intermediate values andthe contracting parties can themselves influence these costs.The context for our analysis is the canonical problem of inducingefficient relation-specific investment and efficient ex posttrade. Among our principle results are: (i) The efficiency andcomplexity of the initial contract are decreasing in the costto create a contract. Hence the best mechanism design contractscan be too costly to write. (ii) When parties use the simplercontract forms, they require renegotiation to capture ex postsurplus and to create efficient investment incentives. In somecases, parties want low renegotiation costs. More interestingis that, in other cases, parties have a strict preference formoderate renegotiation costs. (iii) The effect of contract lawon contract form is significant but has been overlooked. Inparticular, the law's interpretive rules raise the cost of enforcingcomplex contracts, and thus induce parties to use simple contracts.Worse, the law also lowers renegotiation costs, which furtherundermines complex contracts and is also inappropriate for someof the simpler contracts.     

立法成本的法经济学分析

立法成本的法经济学分析目的是为提高法律的适用性和经济效益,法经济学的成本效益分析方法给立法工作提供了崭新的视角及审视问题的方式。在立法中真正确立成本效益观,优化立法资源,加大立法投入,提高立法质量,才能真正达到立法的预期目的。