THE ECONOMICS OF DUELING.

THE ECONOMICS OF DUELING. Dick Weisfelder correctly suggested that this article by Christopher G. Kingston and Robert E. Wright on the economics of dueling is the sort of thing I post about on this blog. Many writers on dueling assume that dueling is irrational. Kingston and Wright think that it was rational. Duels were fought to preserve honor—and Kingston and Wright argue that one kind of honor was what mattered: a reputation for paying debts. They contend that dueling declines after impersonal credit markets develop. When loans are personal and lenders don’t have access to a lot of financial information, dueling is rational because it signals that you are prepared to risk your life to preserve your reputation. A “dishonorable man” who cannot participate in duels can’t borrow, but he also can’t lend because he can’t issue a challenge to enforce a debt. The authors construct a mathematical game theory model of dueling to show how dueling can operate as an enforcement mechanism in a credit market. Their theory is consistent with the last fatal duel in Scotland, which I posted on here.
That duel was fought over a failure to honor a bill of exchange.