This is a ground-breaking book about the foundations of institutional economics. K. William Kapp presents the economic role of institutions for economic development, capital formation and technological dynamics in an easily accessible and comprehensive manner. As a front-rank 20th century institutional economist, Kapp pulls together arguments from a variety of sources, including Thorstein Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith and Gunnar Myrdal, all of which emphasize the crucial role of institutions. The author cements institutional economics as a distinct and coherent framework of analysis to effectively address urgent socio-economic problems, such as environmental disruption and sustainable development. This book begins with a critique of conventional (neoclassical) economics and an overview of the antecedents of institutional economics. The core of the book is formed by the chapters on institutions, human economic behavior and needs, arguing that institutional change is key to directing economic development towards sustainable and adequate living conditions, rather than merely formal growth formulas. The final chapters provide the reader with the institutional theories of capital and technology, showing how capital formation and technological dynamics are determined by institutions, such as the principle of investment for profit. The appendix complements Kapp’s plea for institutional change with articles on science and technology, social costs, substantive economics, and circular and cumulative causation. This book is suited for readers at all levels who are interested in institutional economics, the history of economics thought, political economics as well as ecological and heterodox economics. Researchers and students will find it to be an easily accessible and a concise elaboration on the foundations of institutional economics.

Generic institutionalism offers a new perspective on institutional economic change within an evolutionary framework. The institutional landscape shapes the social fabric and economic organization in manifold ways. The book elaborates on the ubiquity of such institutional forms with regards to their emergence, durability and exit in social agency-structure relations. Thereby institutions are considered as social learning environments changing the knowledge base of the economy along generic rule-sets in non-nomological ways from within. Specific attention is given to a theoretical structuring of the topic in ontology, heuristics and methodology. Part I introduces a generic naturalistic ontology by comparing prevalent ontological claims in evolutionary economics and preparing them for a broader pluralist and interdisciplinary discourse. Part II reconsiders these ontological claims and confronts it with prevalent heuristics, conceptualizations and projections of institutional change. In this respect the book revisits the institutional economic thought of Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich August von Hayek, Joseph Alois Schumpeter and Pierre Bourdieu. A synthesis is suggested in an application of the generic rule-based approach. Part III discusses the implementation of rule-based bottom-up models of institutional change and provides a basic prototype agent-based computational simulation. The evolution of power relations plays an important role in the programming of real-life communication networks. This notion characterizes the discussed policy realms (Part IV) of ecological and financial sustainability as tremendously complex areas of institutional change in political economy, leading to the concluding topic of democracy in practice. The novelty of this approach is given by its modular theoretical structure. It turns out that institutional change is carried substantially by affective social orders in contrast to rational orders as communicated in orthodox economic realms. The characteristics of affective orders are derived theoretically from intersections between ontology and heuristics, where interdependencies between instinct, cognition, rationality, reason, social practice, habit, routine or disposition are essential for the embodiment of knowledge. This kind of research indicates new generic directions to study social learning in particular and institutional evolution in general.

German Ordoliberalism and French Regulation theory, two institutionalist theories born in different national contexts, show striking convergences and complementarities. Based on an original comparison, Institutional Economics in France and Germany analyses the basic concepts, the development and the present relevance of both schools, the way they deal with the crucial methodological issue of complexity and with transformation in post-socialist Europe. It underlines the specificity and fruitfulness of these European approaches to institutional economics, often unfortunately ignored in the English-language literature. Written by leading scholars, this book is a clear presentation of both theories, with numerous illustrations and in-depth analysis of recent research developments. This theoretical, methodological and thematic comparison raises central issues in the growing field of socioeconomic and institutionalist theory.

Allan Garfield Gruchy, now Professor Emeritus at The University of Maryland, retired in 1977 from full-time duty. That he continued to teach his graduate seminar in institutional economics and simply accelerated work on a major study of planning in world economies is only more evidence of the energy and concern he has brought to his teaching and writing through out his career. His undergraduate classes in comparative economic systems and modern economic thought, and his two graduate courses on institu tionalism, were always among the most popular in the department. They were firmly grounded in a perspective that opened the minds of hundreds of students to new avenues of thought and to different modes of economic organization. Returning students who report they quickly forgot the arid intricacies of intermediate theory courses nonetheless recall Allan's verbal thrusts at orthodox positions and at the shortcomings of American eco nomic institutions. Allan worked for many years with Dudley Dillard to construct Maryland's present department and served ably as acting chairman in 1976-77 after Dudley relinquished the chairmanship. His impatient wit enlivened faculty meetings and rendered them expeditious in the extreme, and it was welcomed by all except those with a penchant for pontification. Allan is best known among economists for his elucidation of institutional and neoinstitutional thought and for his comparative analysis of planning v vi PREFACE and growth.

138 articles are arranged thematically to give easy access to the intellectual processes of this influencial economist. Volume 1 deals with his life and perspectives, volume 2 with "political economy" and volume 3 on "Specialized topics

This book is the first to reinterpret John R. Commons's Institutional Economics with a newly discovered manuscript written in 1927 in order to find its contemporary meanings in economic theories. Commons aimed to establish institutional economics to understand capitalism in the USA of that time, when people’s collective actions were gaining importance with the emergence of powerful labor unions, oligopolistic corporations, and national judicial systems. Setting three types of transactions as his central concepts for analysis, Commons described dynamics of capitalism as multiple and cumulative causal processes of transactions, through which the final goal should be achievements of a "reasonable value". He also believed that the reasonable value could be achieved by the evolution of institutions. There is no doubt that Commons's ideas proposed in Institutional Economics such as transactions and collective actions greatly inspired later economists; however, few studies have contributed to comprehensive understanding of the origin of his masterpiece. To what extent and in what sense had Commons rejected or accepted previous classical economics or marginalism for constituting his original institutional economics? What are the meanings and limitations that reasonable value may have for contemporary political economy? Institutional Economics as attempts to resolve deep economic problems at that time. Commons's efforts create important implications for us, those who are living in an era after the global financial crisis and confronting various challenges to political economy.

What is Institutional Economics Institutional economics is a branch of economics that focuses on understanding the function that institutions have in determining economic behavior as well as the impact that the evolutionary process plays. Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented divide between technology on the one hand and the "ceremonial" sphere of society on the other was the primary emphasis of the organization when it was first established. Both its name and its fundamental components may be traced back to an article written by Walton H. Hamilton in 1919 for the American Economic Review. The field of institutional economics places an emphasis on the study of institutions in a more comprehensive manner and considers markets to be the product of the intricate interplay between the many institutions. In the field of economics, the older school is still widely recognized as a prominent heterodox approach nowadays. How you will benefit (I) Insights, and validations about the following topics: Chapter 1: Institutional economics Chapter 2: Neoclassical economics Chapter 3: Thorstein Veblen Chapter 4: Evolutionary economics Chapter 5: The Theory of the Leisure Class Chapter 6: New institutionalism Chapter 7: Labour economics Chapter 8: Wesley Clair Mitchell Chapter 9: Heterodox economics Chapter 10: Geoffrey Hodgson Chapter 11: Historical institutionalism Chapter 12: Herbert J. Davenport Chapter 13: History of economic thought Chapter 14: European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy Chapter 15: Schools of economic thought Chapter 16: Institutionalist political economy Chapter 17: Vivien A. Schmidt Chapter 18: Perspectives on capitalism by school of thought Chapter 19: Association for Evolutionary Economics Chapter 20: Transaction Man Chapter 21: Veblen-Commons Award (II) Answering the public top questions about institutional economics. (III) Real world examples for the usage of institutional economics in many fields. (IV) Rich glossary featuring over 1200 terms to unlock a comprehensive understanding of institutional economics. (eBook only). Who will benefit Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of institutional economics.

This collection of essays comprises some of Rudolf Richter’s important contributions to research on New Institutional Economics (NIE). It deals with the central idea, principles, and methodology of New Institutional Economics and explores its relation to sociology and law. Other chapters examine applications of NIE to various microeconomic and macroeconomic issues in the face of uncertainty, from entrepreneurship to the euro crisis.

Institutional economics is recognised as a peculiarly American development in economics — nothing quite like it emerged in Britain or continental Europe. As such, a knowledge of the literature of institutionalism is a necessary part of understanding the history of American economics and American social thought more broadly. The work of the authors featured in this collection served to create and define the American institutionalist tradition in economics: Thorstein Veblen, Richard Theodore Ely, John Rogers Commons, Robert Franklin Hoxie, Wesley Clair Mitchell and Walton Hale Hamilton. These figures were also central to institutionalism’s numerous debates on the unifying characteristics of the movement and its principal contributions — making this collection of their most important works a convenient vehicle to assess these issues. It is also of increasing value given the fact that the main concerns of institutionalists, such as the role of institutions and development of an evolutionary approach, having been coming back into prominence as important issues in economics.

This introduction to institutional economics, follows the history of the field since the early 20th century until the present day. It concentrates on influential authors in the main schools of institutional economics. Institutional economics is defined as economic thought that considers institutions to be relevant for economic theory, and consequently criticizes the neoclassical mainstream for having pushed them out of the discipline; it deals specially with the nature, the origin, the change of institutions, and their effects on economic performance. It is a family of different theories that were initially influential in economics, then lost much of their weight in the middle half of the 20th century, and eventually recovered significant creative vitality and impact in the last twenty years. The book puts the recent developments in historical perspective by showing how important themes like the importance of habits, the role of formal and informal rules, the relation of organizations and institutions, the hierarchy and complementarity of institutions, the evolutionary character of institutional change, have been explored by various authors or schools.