Argues that market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. This book shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. It examines the biological basis of economic morality and traces the connections between morality and markets.

"Most people are fundamentally honest, trustworthy, and fair. Why? Because they have a capacity for empathy and trust that is just as innate as their capacity for selfishness. It evolved in order to enable people to capture social benefits through exchange. Markets not only need that instinct; they also nurture it. This simple and beautiful idea has been disinterred by the authors of this book from beneath the cynical sophistries of the twentieth century."--Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue

"Before he became famous as the father of free-market capitalism through The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a long-forgotten and still little-known treatise about the role of values and virtues in economic and social life. At last, science has caught up with Smith, and now Paul Zak has gathered leading scholars and scientists in a definitive volume on why markets are moral. This paradigm-shifting book is required reading not only for economists, but for all behavioral scientists."--Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic, columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Mind of the Market

"Understanding how values are reflected in markets, and how markets either reduce or increase their positive or negative effects on human welfare, is obviously important. The work of the scholars represented in this volume contributes significantly to these issues and adds substantially to the foundations of analysis that will eventually lead to a richer and more complete understanding of these issues.
I look forward to seeing the creation of an entirely new field of inquiry in economics, and in its sister social sciences, focused deeply on the positive analysis of the role of values in elevating the possible outcomes of human interaction. . . . The role of values is a purely positive question for economics and the other social sciences, and this volume begins that journey toward creating such a science."--from the foreword by Michael C. Jensen, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School

"Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economic one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis."