Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French colonists of Atlantic Canada (the Acadians) and a Native American tribe (the Mi’kmaq) between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the areas around the Bay of Fundy in the modern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Under a relative state of anarchy, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to minimize the relative returns to using violence by adopting rules of collective decision-making that favored consensus-building. By prioritizing consensus, distributional coalitions were faced with higher decision-making costs, making it difficult for concentrated interest groups within each society to capture the gains from fighting and spilling them over as external costs over the rest of the population. As a result, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to reap the benefits of productive specialization and social cooperation under the division of labor.

北美是否可以更和平地解决，减少对美洲原住民的财产权侵犯？为了回答这个问题，我们利用了 17 世纪和 18 世纪之间加拿大大西洋地区的法国殖民者（阿卡迪亚人）和美洲原住民部落（米克马克）在现代诺瓦省芬迪湾周围地区的案例。斯科舍省和新不伦瑞克省。在相对无政府状态下，阿卡迪亚人和米克马克人都能够通过采用有利于达成共识的集体决策规则来最大限度地减少使用暴力的相对回报。通过优先考虑共识，分布式联盟面临更高的决策成本，使每个社会中集中的利益集团难以从战斗中获取收益并将其作为外部成本溢出到其余人口中。结果，阿卡迪亚人和米克马克人都能够在劳动分工下获得生产专业化和社会合作的好处。