The stimuli for writing this paper come from multiple sources. First, both Allan Schmid (2004) and Douglass North (2005) have urged social scientists to move beyond the static and mechanistic analysis of much of contemporary political economy and game theory that focuses on a given situation and...

Long view organizations have a technical core combining high levels of Woodwardian (1958) technological complexity and Thompsonian (1967) technological intensity. This significantly diminishes their capacity for operational flexibility and strategic adaptation. Little is known about how such...

Adopting a critical stance towards North's recent theory of institutional change and economic performance, the paper proposes a concept of global efficiency which encompasses not only standard allocative efficiency, but also the efficiency of political institutions in competition among groups. A...

It is argued that firm cooperation in supply chain management can be classified as a hybrid governance structure in a new institutional sense. Using a key informant survey, exploratory data on transaction dimensions and supply chain management was gathered and analyzed. Findings suggest that the...

How are constitutional rules sustained? We investigate this problem in the context of how the institutions of federalism are sustained. As Riker (1964) emphasizes, a central design problem of federalism is how to create institutions that at once grant the central government enough authority to...

Hungary is home to a great diversity of plant and animal species, whose preservation is of global value. This paper focuses on the institutional aspects of the research project on on-farm conservation of crop genetic resources in three Environmentally Sensitive Areas of Hungary (Devavanya,...

Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions? An extension of the Coase theorem to politics would suggest the answer is no. This paper discusses various approaches to political economy and develops the argument that there are strong empirical and theoretical grounds for believing...

This paper deals with similarities and differences between new economic sociology (NES) and new institutional economics (NIE). We start with brief reports on the basic ideas of NES and NIE. Regarding the latter, we concentrate on NIE in the sense of Oliver Williamson who introduced the term and...

Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy's unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend...

This paper seeks to provide an improved understanding of the origins of democracy. It begins by developing a theoretical model to demonstrate how exogenous economic conditions can influence both the incentives to establish democratic institutions and the likelihood that such institutions...