The 2020 global pandemic abruptly brought into question many of our social, economic and political institutions. COVID-19 is more than a public health crisis—as economies and states falter there are deep questions about the resilience and robustness of our political and economic systems. Are...

Investment is a function of expected profit, which involves calculation of the cost of trust. Blockchain technology is a new institutional technology (Davidson et al 2018) that industrialises trust (Berg et al 2018). We therefore expect that the adoption of blockchain technology into the economy...

Understanding the complexities of blockchain governance is urgent. The aim of this paper is to draw on other theories of governance to provide insight into the design of blockchain governance mechanisms. We define blockchain governance as the processes by which stakeholders (those who are...

This paper examines the institutional context of the entrepreneurial discovery of blockchain applications. It draws on institutional and entrepreneurial theory to introduce the economic problem entrepreneurship in the early stages of new technologies, examines the diversity of self-governed...

From the adoption of the shipping container to coordinated trade liberalisation, reductions in trade costs have propelled modern globalisation. In this paper we analyse the application of blockchain to reduce the trade costs of producing and coordinating trusted information along supply chains....

For the past century economists have proposed a suite of theories relating to industrial dynamics, technological change and innovation. There has been an implication in these models that the institutional environment is stable. However, a new class of institutional technologies — most notably...

This paper incorporates blockchain activities into the broader remit of entangled political economy theory, emphasising economic and other social phenomena as the emergent by-product of human interactions. Blockchains are a digital technology combining peer-to-peer network computing and...

Blockchain technology enables entrepreneurs to develop new decentralised governance structures to coordinate human interaction and exchange. That is, blockchain enables exit from political-socioeconomic systems through new forms of property rights protection and enforcement. This chapter...

We extend the Institutional Possibility Frontier (IPF) — a theoretical framework depicting the institutional trade-offs between the dual costs of dictatorship and disorder (Djankov et al. 2003) — by incorporating the notion of subjective costs. The costs of institutional choice are not...

We propose a new type of commons – an ‘innovation commons' – that is an emergent institutional solution to ‘the innovation problem' (defined as a collective action problem, not a market failure problem). In an innovation commons entrepreneurs pool innovation resources (i.e. inputs into...