Some institutional transitions are implemented as the deliberate outcome of bargaining among a small number of elite groups, but many are more decentralized, with a large number of private actors informally adopting new practices that are later confirmed by changes in formal governance structures. For example, land tenure norms, changes in conventional crop shares, shifts in inheritance practic...

Are efficiency considerations important for understanding differences in the development of institutions? We model institutional quality as the degree to which obligations associated with exchanging capital can be enforced. Establishing a positive level of enforcement requires an aggregate investment of capital that is no longer available for production. When capital endowments are more unequal...

This thesis establishes Virtual Institutions as a comprehensive software engineering technology for the development of 3D Virtual Worlds that require normative regulation of participants’ interactions (such as the commercially-oriented Virtual Worlds). 3D Virtual Worlds technology currently offers somewhat unregulated environments without means to enforce norms of behavior and interaction rules...

The collapse of the communist empire coincided with a new wave of constitution making. All the Eastern European countries introduced in the new constitutions an organ in charge of constitutional adjudication modeled on what we define below the Kelsenian type. This was neither surprising nor original. The same phenomenon happened in Southern Europe about 20 years ago after the collapse of fascis...

The exogenous approach to enriching any given base logic for probabilistic and quantum reasoning is brought into the realm of institutions. The theory of institutions helps in capturing the precise relationships between the logics that are obtained, and, furthermore, helps in analyzing some of the key design decisions and opens the way to make the approach more useful and, at the same time, mor...

I propose to show how to translate the economic analysis of institutions developed in the tradition of “worst case” political economy into the lingua franca of robust statistics. An institution will be defined as contingent upon a design theory and the difficulty we consider is the use of the institution by the designer. The technical bridge between institutional robustness and statistical robu...

The paper traces the role of religion in contemporary criminology as well as reviewing the development of scholarly interest in religion within the field ofcriminology. We begin with a sys,tematic review of270 published studies to better understand the state of the literature examining the relationship between religion and crime. Our systematic review provides support for the notion that religi...