The advance of economics into the traditional domains of other social sciences has thus far largely overlooked anthropology. In this review article on Frederic Pryor's The Origins of the Economy I argue that economics has many fruitful applications to the study of primitive society. I fault Pryor's book for its lack of a theoretical framework and argue that such a framework can be derived from the economics of information and uncertainty. In particular, it can be argued that many primitive social institutions are substitutes for formal markets in insurance.

The advance of economics into the traditional domains of other social sciences has thus far largely overlooked anthropology. In this review article on Frederic Pryor's The Origins of the Economy I argue that economics has many fruitful applications to the study of primitive society. I fault Pryor's book for its lack of a theoretical framework and argue that such a framework can be derived from the economics of information and uncertainty. In particular, it can be argued that many primitive social institutions are substitutes for formal markets in insurance.

This paper presents a model and some highly tentative empirical estimates of the social costs of monopoly and monopoly-inducing regulation in the United States. Unlike the previous studies, it assumes that competition to obtain a monopoly results in the transformation of expected monopoly profits into social costs. A major conclusion is that public regulation is probably a larger source of social costs than private monopoly. The implications of the analysis for several public policy issues, such as appropriate policy toward mergers and price discrimination, are also discussed.