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Coordination, Commitment, and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild
Abstract
We interpret historical evidence in light of a repeated-game model to conclude that merchant guilds emerged during the late medieval period to allow rulers of trade centers to commit to the security of alien merchants. The merchant guild developed the theoretically required attributes, secured merchants' property rights, and evolved in response to crises to extend the range of its effectiveness, contributing to the expansion of trade during the late medieval period. We elaborate on the relations between our theory and the monopoly theory of merchant guilds and contrast it with repeated-game theories that provide no role for formal organization.
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Citations
Cited by
David, P. A. (1994) · Structural Change and Economic Dynamics · doi:10.1016/0954-349x(94)90002-7 · Cited by 929
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The Political Economy of the World Trading System: WTO and Beyond
Hoekman, B., & Kostecki, M. (2001) · doi:10.1093/019829431x.001.0001 · Cited by 544
Courts and Relational Contracts
Johnson, S. (2002) · Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization · doi:10.1093/jleo/18.1.221 · Cited by 533
Endogenous Communication Among Lenders and Entrepreneurial Incentives
Padilla, A. J., & Pagano, M. (1997) · Review of Financial Studies · doi:10.1093/rfs/10.1.205 · Cited by 409
Metadata
- Authors
- Greif, A., Milgrom, P., & Weingast, B. R.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1994-08
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 745-776
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W2061565725
- Cited by
- 1,220
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 26.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Greif, A., Milgrom, P., & Weingast, B. R. (1994). Coordination, Commitment, and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/261953
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
