Much of the research for this paper also connects with the work of the ESRC funded NEXSUS project coordinated by Peter Allen. I am particularly grateful to Richard Nelson and an anonymous referee for their constructive and helpful comments on a previous draft. An insistent theme in Richard Nelson's work is that of 'capitalism as an engine of progress'. In this paper I explore this idea through ...

We propose a logic-based rendition of electronic institutions – these are means to specify open agent organisations. We employ a simple notation based on first-order logic and set theory to represent an expressive class of electronic institutions. We also provide a formal semantics to our constructs and present a distributed implementation of a platform to enact electronic institutions specifie...

This paper investigates the institutional reason underlying the change in the trajectory of economic growth in post-reform China, and argues that the trajectory of growth was much more normal during the period of 1978-89 than in the post-1989 era. In the former period, growth was largely induced by equality-generating institutional change in agriculture and the emergence of non-state industrial...

We develop a general logic-independent structural induction proof method at the level of abstract institutions. This provides a solid and uniform mathematical foundations to induction proof methodologies for a wide variety of actual logic-based formal specification frameworks. Our development is based technically upon an axiomatic approach to substitutions within institution theory.

Category theory provides an excellent foundation for studying structured speciica-tions and their composition. For example, theories can be structured together in a diagram, and their composition can be obtained as a colimit. There is, however, a growing awareness, both in theory and in speciication practice, that structured theories should not be viewed just as the \scaaolding" used to build u...

Modal logics are successfully used as specification logics for reactive systems. However, they are not expressive enough to refer to individual states and reason about the local behaviour of such systems. This limitation is overcome in hybrid logics which introduce special symbols for naming states in models. Actually, hybrid logics have recently regained interest, resulting in a number of new ...