This thesis explores the emergence of specialization, exchange, and property rights with economic experiments in the laboratory and agent-based computational simulations. Building on previous laboratory research on the ability of human subjects to discover and implement specialization and trade, I develop a simulation model of human decision making to replicate behavior in a two-good, eight-person economy. I then extend the model to make predictions about human behavior in additional experimental environments with exogenous changes to group size and the structure of property rights. I find that simple learning heuristics capture the process by which subjects discover and implement specialization and exchange. Furthermore, when the correct property norm is made available to my simulated agents, the heuristics also describe the process by which the norm is adopted. Since property emerges as a convention that is adopted incrementally by the members of a group, I then ask how the content of the convention can be expected to change with the characteristics of the resource over which property rights are established. I conclude with a discussion of the future research that will derive from this project.