In the spring on 2006, a workshop was held at Michigan State University to honour the career of A. Allan Schmid and his writings about how institutions evolve and how alternative institutions, including property rights, shape political relationships and impact economic performance. This edited book is the outcome of the workshop. It is a collection

Major approaches to law and public policy, ranging from law and economics to the fundamental rights approach to constitutional law, are based on the belief that the identification of the correct social goals or values is the key to describing or prescribing law and public policy outcomes. In this book, Neil Komesar argues that this emphasis on goal choice ignores an essential element—institutional choice. Indeed, as important as determining our social goals is deciding which institution is best equipped to implement them—the market, the political process, or the adjucative process. Pointing out that all three institutions are massive, complex, and imperfect, Komesar develops a strategy for comparative institutional analysis that assesses variations in institutional ability. He then powerfully demonstrates the value of this analytical framework by using it to examine important contemporary issues ranging from tort reform to constitution-making.

This exciting new book from Geoffrey Hodgson is eagerly awaited by social scientists from many different backgrounds. This book charts the rise, fall and renewal of institutional economics in the critical, analytical and readable style that Hodgson's fans have come to know and love, and that a new generation of readers will surely come to appreciate.

Allan Schmid’s innovative text, Conflict and Cooperation: Institutional and Behavioral Economics,investigates "the rules of the game," how institutions--both formal and informal--affect these rules, and how these rules are changed to serve competing interests. This text addresses both formal and informal institutions and the impact of alternative institutions, as well as institutional change and evolution. With its broad applications and numerous practice and discussion questions, this book will be appealing not only to students of economics, but also to those studying sociology, law, and political science. Addresses formal and informal institutions, the impact of alternative institutions, and institutional change and evolution. Presents a framework open to changing preferences, bounded rationality, and evolution. Explains how to form empirically testable hypotheses using experiments, case studies, and econometrics. Includes numerous practice and discussion questions.

The implicit topology of international institutional complexes varies greatly across policy areas. In some areas, the lion's share of everyday policy cooperation is shaped by a single institution with alternative and more regional institutions operating in its shadow. In other policy fields, institutional structures appear to be different, seeing a range of non-hierarchical, decentralized, alternative institutions. The Institutional Topology of International Regime Complexes: Mapping Inter-Institutional Structures in Global Governance provides a systematic conceptualization and explanation of the evolution of these varying institutional topologies underlying regime complexes across five issue areas of Global Governance: Intellectual Property Protection, Tax Avoidance, Financial Stability, Development Aid, and Energy Governance. By providing an empirically grounded, network-based conceptualization and mapping of institutional topologies, as well as a theoretical explanation for their variation across policy space and time, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of both the empirical manifestation of inter-institutional structures across various policy fields of Global Governance and the issue specific factors that shape the varying institutional trajectories spurring (de-) centralization. Daßler combines quantitative network analyses with qualitative case studies to trace institutional decentralization processes across five highly relevant issue areas of Global Governance. This volume shows how the nature of issue-specific cooperation problems translates into disparate structures among multilateral institutions occupying the same regime complex. In light of growing concerns about the future trajectories of Global Governance in times of heightened geopolitical tensions, Daßler offers a fresh perspective to comparatively capture the profoundly varying institutional landscapes across different issue areas and their associated challenges and benefits of multilateral cooperation. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

Die tiefe Wirtschaftskrise in Folge der Corona-Pandemie stellt Kubas Sozialismus vor eine ungeahnte Belastungsprobe. Die Regierung in Havanna hat eine grundlegende Reform von Wirtschaft, Institutionengefüge und Sozialsystem auf die Agenda gesetzt. Der Band vereint Beiträge führender internationaler Experten und von der Insel selbst, die aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die Herausforderungen analysieren, vor denen Kuba heute steht.