Social institutions were often founded by the elite to avoid social upheavals. Institutions helped mitigate the threat of violent social responses to labor-saving innovations. But their organizational forms were influenced by preexisting cultural and social factors. The differences in Chinese...

This paper presents an economic institution which enabled eleventh-century traders to benefit from employing overseas agents despite the commitment problem inherent in these relations. Agency relations were governed by a coalition--an economic institution in which expectations, implicit...