This paper builds an account of how people use role models as a heuristic that helps them overcome the uncertainty involved in 'transformative experiences', i.e. significant changes of personal identity. The use of role models is described in the context of markets (choosing a career), morality...

This paper revisits the debates about the meaning of economic efficiency, and the moral dilemmas associated with using Kaldor-Hicks efficiency or Pareto efficiency for policy analysis. I lay out the best case for efficiency as meta-value, and highlight that it still does not allow us to evade...

The tension between the desire to reform institutions to achieve improved outcomes and the possibility of unintended consequences because of the complexity of institutional interactions has a long intellectual history. Often, the tension is marked by two extreme positions: either to deny the...

Polycentricity is a system of many inter-dependent but autonomous decision centers operating under an over-arching set of rules and norms that they themselves set up, monitor, and enforce. A decision center is part of the polycentric system (rather than an outsider that may be affected by the...

This paper presents an empirical account of the diversity of regulatory developments over the past fifty years, and provides a theoretical framework for understanding this diversity. We build upon the "varieties of capitalism" and the "regulatory capitalism" literatures which provide methods for...

The concept of polycentricity was developed with two (related) goals in mind: (1) as a descriptive tool for understanding emergent social-institutional-political orders, especially emergent orders that lack a price system as a coordination device; and (2) as a normative policy tool for enabling...

Similar to fellow Nobelists Vernon Smith and Richard Thaler, Elinor Ostrom has emphasized not just our cognitive limits, but also the institutions that people create to overcome them. But, while Vernon Smith or Thaler still focus primarily on private choices, and the institutions within which...

This paper explores some of the reasons why capitalism experiences periodic crises of legitimacy, and asks whether Richard Epstein's “simple rules” heuristic can help. The current legitimacy problem is exacerbated by the fact that we are also in a low growth situation. This means that some...

This paper explains how to use the calculus of consent framework to think more rigorously about self-governance, and applies this framework to the issue of evaluating federal regulatory agencies. Robust political economy is the idea that institutions should be designed to work well even under...