The proposition that constitutional rules serve as permanent, fixed points of interaction are challenged by observations of contestable rule amendment and the emergence of de facto authority. This observation not only applies to conventional political constitutions, but to the fundamental rules...

In this paper we provide a brief survey of the potential of blockchain technology to propel a process of private entrepreneurial discovery of institutions that challenge state hegemony. Entrepreneurs now have access to new tools to develop decentralised private governance across areas which have...

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a wide ranging personal data protection regime of greater magnitude than any similar regulation previously in the EU, or elsewhere. In this paper, we outline how the GDPR impacts the value of data held by data collectors before proposing some...

This paper offers a new framework to understand institutional change in human societies. An ‘institutional fork' occurs when a society splits into two divergent paths with shared histories. The idea of forking comes from the open-source software community where developers are free to copy of a...

Identity is an integral part of all but the most trivial economic, social and political transactions. Using transaction cost economics, we determine that identity costs are a distinct and measurable subset of transaction costs. In certain transactions, such as credit arrangements, identity costs...

Identification forms a key part of all but the least sophisticated economic and political transactions. More complex or significant transactions demand more formal identification of the parties involved. In this paper we develop an institutional as well as a public choice theory of identity. We...

Conventional public choice literature suggests that interest groups have a largely malign effect upon the economy. Suggesting that interest groups are primarily established to lobby governments for rents, the public choice approach essentially rests upon normative presumptions concerning the...