My spring semester officially comes to a close on Monday, so looking ahead to the rest of spring as well as my summer break, I am happy to report that I will be working on three, possibly four, scholarly projects as follows:

1. First and foremost, following up on my previous work on orbit auctions (see here), Professor Justin Evans and I are researching and writing a new “space markets” paper — tentatively titled “Space Auctions and the Tragedy of the Outer Space Commons” — which will describe how to actually get space markets off the ground, beginning with the tricky problem of how to define property rights in orbits. We hope to complete a first draft in time for the annual meeting of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB), which will take place in Washington, D.C. in August.
2. Next up is one of my unpublished game-theory papers, “The Colonel Blotto Litigation Game“, which I was invited to present at the Ninth Annual Civil Procedure Workshop at UC Law in San Francisco on May 31. Rest assured, I will be reviewing and revising my Colonel Blotto draft ahead of the workshop and blogging about it next month.
3. Last but not least, I will be making another round of additions to my work-in-progress “Die Adam Smith Probleme“, which I am co-authoring with my colleague and friend Salim Rashid. This paper surveys the many open problems still surrounding the work and life of the great Scottish philosopher-economist. As it happens, I have already been invited to present this work at a special session of the next meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES), which will take place in Santiago de Chile in mid-July; in the meantime, I will blog about our new set of Adam Smith problems here, most likely in June and July.

The fourth project is, as yet, undefined, but I want to leave some extra space for it in case something unexpected or surprising catches my fancy.