My novel Salamander is a fantasy in which some mages are truthtellers. I did not put as much thought as I should have into the question of how a society would be different if it was possible to tell when someone was (subjectively) lying, a question relevant to fictional worlds but also to possible futures. A better understanding of how the mind works might produce a real lie detector, one that reliably reported whether a speaker believed that what he said was true. The size of firms is determined by the tradeoff between the transaction cost of market transactions and the inefficiency of hierarchical coordination; a profit-maximizing firm does things in-house until it gets big enough that the cost of increased inefficiency from a larger firm outweighs the cost of doing them on the market.1 A reliable lie detector would reduce some of the problems of market transactions. You would still not know if a potential suppliers product was as good or he was as reliable a source as he claimed...
learn more
