The title of the book is somewhat misleading: the book is in fact both an essay on the intellectual history of the theory of transaction in economics, as well as an attempt to articulate a broad ...analytical framework for the study of the problem of transactions in institutional theory. In that field we usually associate almost instinctively the notion of “transaction” with the concept of “transaction costs”, embraced as a ready-made construct handed out to us via the intellectual tradition tha...
Is there a Classical Liberalism inspired doctrine of public governance, besides the basic pro-market and anti-statist stance? What are the governance operational principles that should frame the ...Classical Liberal approach to public administration and public policy? Answering the critics, the article argues that Classical Liberalism has at its core an intrinsic doctrine of public governance whose conceptual and theoretical apparatus has been bolstered and modernized by the Public Choice revolution. The efforts of the GMU/Mercatus research program to articulate it have advanced in several stages so far, and the article outlines them, while setting them in the larger context of the relevant literatures.
Revisiting the theory of institutional hybridity and diversity developed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom to cope with the challenge of the “neither states nor markets” institutional domain, this article ...reconstructs the Ostromian system along the “value heterogeneity–co-production–polycentricity” axis. It articulates the elements of a theory of value heterogeneity and of the fuzzy boundaries between private and public. It rebuilds the model of co-production, clarifying the ambiguity surrounding a key technical public choice theoretical assumption, and it demonstrates (a) why it should not be confused with the Alchian-Demsetz team production model and (b) how co-production engenders a type of market failure that has been neglected so far. In light of this analysis, the article reconsiders polycentricity, the capstone of the Ostromian system, explaining why polycentricity may be seen as a solution both to this co-production market failure problem and to the problems of social choice in conditions of deep heterogeneity. It also discusses further normative corollaries.
Simple observation presents two stylized facts that call for integration into a single explanatory framework. One fact is that societies reflect generally though certainly not perfectly coordinated ...patterns of activity. The other fact is that only a subset of those activities is coordinated with the direct assistance of market prices. Price-theoretic explanations of how prices serve to secure economic coordination are thus incomplete because contemporary environments feature significant expanses of territory where market pricing has little presence. We refer in this respect to territory occupied both by non-profit enterprises and by political enterprises. In this paper we explore how societal coordination can occur when market pricing covers but a subset of the range of economic activities within a society. A key feature of our explanation is the network architecture of enterprises within a society.
The volume is a unique attempt to explore the relationship between two of the most interesting contemporary schools of thought evolving at the interface between social science and social philosophy: ...The Austrian tradition of F A Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the Bloomington tradition of Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom.
The potential link between Catholic social teaching (CST) and the theoretical developments associated with new institutional economics (NIE) are explored. The emphasis is on the contributions of two ...Nobel Prize winners in economics—Douglass C. North and Elinor Ostrom—and on the work of political scientist Vincent Ostrom. By adjusting the neoclassical presumptions dominating modern economic theory to include culture, ideas, and religious beliefs in the analysis of economic behavior, the economic and social theorizing developed by these scholars advances a framework that has significant affinities with CST’s foundational critique of economic concepts and theories and with its normative position regarding the nature and functioning of social and economic systems.
This paper reveals a novel and perhaps surprising ingredient in the mix of influences that inspired and informed the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on self-governance: cybernetics, understood as a ...theory of control via feedback mechanisms. Based on this crucial insight, the paper portrays self-governance as involving an architecture of multiple levels of so-called ‘second order’ feedback mechanisms. Such compounded systems of organization are the key to understanding any self-governance process and the paper argues that their intrinsic logic provides a critical link between the work of the Ostroms and the public choice and constitutional political economy perspectives on institutional order. The paper thereby offers both a fresh perspective on the Ostromian view of self-governance and also of also of governance theory in general.
