Abstract
Central to the economics of property rights-public choice theory1 is the recognition that laws and institutions are important in promoting the efficiency of an economy. One of these institutions is the law of contracts.
Reprinted from The Journal of Legal Studies, 10 (2), (June, 1981), 349–362, with the kind permission from the Journal’s publisher, The University of Chicago Press. The article is a revised version of chapter 4 (Part 2) and chapter 5 of my Ph.D. thesis (Landa 1978). See also Acknowledgements.
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Acknowledgements
This is a revised, shorter version of my paper (Landa 1979) entitled “The economics of the ethnically-homogeneous middleman group: A low-cost club-like economic organization for economizing on contract-enforcement and information costs,” Institute for Policy Analysis, University of Toronto, Working Paper Series, No. 7924, Oct. 1979. I am indebted to Alan Abouchar, Albert Breton, Thomas E. Borcherding, James M. Buchanan, Jack Carr, John Dales, Louis De Alessi, and Allan Hynes for helpful comments on a previous draft. I also wish to thank Robert McKay and Francis X. Tannian for their comments on an early version presented at the Public Choice Society meetings, April 15–17, 1976, Roanoke, Virginia. Finally, thanks are due to Richard A. Posner and an anonymous referee for suggestions for improving this paper.
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Landa, J.T. (2016). A Theory of the Ethnically Homogeneous Middleman Group: An Institutional Alternative to Contract Law. In: Economic Success of Chinese Merchants in Southeast Asia. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54019-6_5
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