A wide-ranging, synthetic work of history like Fraud is meant to stand on its own, situating readers without provision of additional primary sources or amplifying authorial reflections.  As with most such volumes, the editorial process involved extensive honing and revising, with a great deal of material ending up on the cutting room floor.  Publishing houses like Princeton University Press also have to keep economic considerations in mind; as a result, editors sensibly offer assessments about the best way to reach intended audiences and set constraints about book length, number and type of illustrations, general parameters for endnotes, and other features of a given volume.

In a digital world, authors have the capacity to offer readers ready access to supplemental material not available in the printed, electronic, or audio version of a book.  This section of Suckers and Swindlers provides links to articles of mine that inform my analytical approaches, as well as several original notes and commentaries on aspects of Fraud.

The book’s analysis of anti-fraud institutions reflects my engagement over the past decade with the evolution of modern regulatory institutions in the United States and other industrialized societies, and more particularly the dynamics of business self-regulation and co-regulation.

Readers interested in the broader history of regulatory institutions may want to consult:

• my discussion of the history of the American regulatory state, under the entry “Regulation,” in The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (2009); and
• a much longer essay, “The Dialectics of Modern Regulatory Governance,” which serves as an extensive introduction to the three-volume research collection, Business Regulation (2015), that I edited for Elgar Publishing.

For those who wish to engage more deeply with business self-regulation and co-regulatory strategies of regulatory governance, I would suggest:

• “The Promise and Pitfalls of Co-Regulation: How Governments Can Draw on Private Governance for Public Purpose (co-written with Marc Eisner, and appearing in David Moss and John Cisternino, eds., New Perspectives on Regulation [2009]);
• “The Prospects for Effective ‘Co-Regulation’ in the United States: A Historian’s View from the Early Twenty-First Century” (which appeared in a 2010 volume that I edited with David Moss, Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation, in conjunction with the work of The Tobin Project);
• the 2014 article, “Rights of Way, Red Flags, and Safety Valves: Regulated Business Self-Regulation in America, 1850-1940” (which appeared in a special issue of a German journal focusing on the history of co-regulation); and
• “American Better Business Bureaus, the Truth-in-Advertising Movement, and the Complexities of Legitimizing Business Self-Regulation over the Long Term,” a 2017 article that appeared in the open source journal, Politics and Governance.

Should a reader want to undertake deeper investigation into the historical evolution of business fraud and anti-fraud regulation, I offer several new essays here, each aimed at a scholarly audience.

• “A Brief Consideration of Primary Sources and Methods” sketches the array of documents that underpinned my research, discusses some key conceptual approaches to regulatory governance that shaped my thinking and arguments, and offers several conceptual schematics that convey snapshots of anti-fraud regulatory ecologies.
• “A Profusion of Microhistories: The Historiography of American Business Fraud” furnishes an overview of scholarship on the core subject matter of the book, mostly from the discipline of history, but also from other social science disciplines (see also the bibliography of the works cited/consulted in the research and writing of Fraud).
• “Avenues for Further Inquiry” lays out several research agendas that I see as meriting attention, first and foremost from historians, but also from social scientists and humanists from other disciplines.
• “A Typology of Business Fraud in Modern Economies” describes the major forms of economic deceit perpetrated by businesses against their counterparties, and links those strategies and tactics to psychological tendencies identified by behavioral economists.
• “A Typology of Anti-Fraud Regulations/Policies” pulls together the most important policy instruments adopted by policy makers and anti-fraud organizations, distinguishing efforts at “Pre-Transaction Market Structuring” from “Monitoring and Post-Transaction Enforcement.”

Finally, to get a sense of how Fraud relates to my earlier research and writing on the history of American bankruptcy, as well as how I see the construction of stories by economic actors as critical to the functioning and evolution of economic systems, see my essay, “Story-Making and the Fault-Lines of American Capitalism,” which appears in the National Humanities Center’s Humanities Moments Archive. This essay is framed by engagement with the 2016 documentary, Betting on Zero, which examines the controversies over the business practices of the multi-level marketing company, Herbalife.