This paper reviews the activity of professional legal organizations as factors in the transfer from limited access order (LAO) to open access order (OAO) according to the theory of North, Wallis and Weingast. By analyzing the experience of lawyers' collective action in developing countries, this...

This paper analyzes a simple model that captures the relationship between institutional quality, the shadow economy and corruption. It shows that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy and affects the corruption market. The exact relationship between corruption and...

We consider a network economy in which economic agents are connected within a structure of value-generating relationships. Agents are assumed to be able to participate in three types of economic activities: autarkic self-provision; binary matching interactions; and multi-person cooperative...

This paper, written as a contribution to a festchrift in honor of Neil Komesar, subjects his "comparative institutional analysis" (CIA) to a comparative analysis with various other social-scientific approaches to CIA. Neil Komesar is among the very few legal scholars who has taken to heart...

Why do sudden and massive social, economic, and political changes occur when and where they do? Are there institutional preconditions that encourage such changes when present and discourage such changes when absent? In this paper, I employ a general model which suggests that massive equilibrium...

We consider an economy in which agents are embedded in a network of potential value-generating relationships. Agents are assumed to be able to participate in three types of economic interactions: Autarkic self-provision; bilateral interaction; and multilateral collaboration. We introduce two...

We report results from a laboratory experiment on strategic bargaining with indivisibilities studying the role of asymmetries, both in preferences and institutions. We find that subjects do not fully grasp the equilibrium effects asymmetries have on bargaining power and identify how subjects'...

Hierarchies are pervasive in political settings. From judges to elected politicians, from activists to bureaucrats, political agents compete to be promoted to higher positions. This paper studies political tournaments and their impact on key aspects of political performance: accountability and...

Private institutions are complementary, both to contracts and the public and general institutions of a society, in that they allow agents to collectively coordinate (and so benefit from economies of scale, from learning effects, and from management of externalities), while avoiding over high...