Once created, institutions often change in subtle and gradual ways over time. Although less dramatic than abrupt and wholesale transformations, these slow and piecemeal changes can be equally consequential for patterning human behavior and for shaping substantive political outcomes. Consider, for example, the British House of Lords. This is an institution that began to take shape in the thirtee...

We provide a dynamic model of natural resource management where the optimal institutional structure that governs resource use changes with resource depletion. Copeland and Taylor (2009) analyze how characteristics of a natural resource determine whether its steady-state management regime is open access, communal property, or private property. We extend this and other studies of endogenous insti...

Higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in OECD states over the past two decades. Some states have introduced tuition fees for the first time, others have massively increased public funding for higher education, and still others remain in stasis, retaining the elitist model with which they began the post-war era. This paper develops a formal model of the politics of high...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Academic institutions are typically resistant to change. Redefining scholarship is an important issue for academic health care institutions. This study examines the change process at institutions that have attempted to change the definition of scholarship. METHODS Five medical schools were identified that had recently redesigned their promotion and tenure systems bas...

Institutional change, collective action, and cooperation are closely related. The connection between institutional change and collective action comes from the fact that both democratic political institutions and norms of behavior are collectively chosen: they are the result of a collective action process. Collective action, however, requires a solution to the cooperation problem, for it is usua...

This paper investigates the City University experience as an instance of the impact of a new technology, in this case eportfolios, on institutional change and the contribution of e-portfolios to the emerging priorities on the UK HE landscape.

Contemporary approaches to varieties to capitalism are often criticized for neglecting issues of institutional change. This paper develops a perspective on institutional change designed to be applicable to the equilibrium analyses of such approaches but distinctive relative to competing understandings of institutions. It begins by outlining an approach to institutional stability, which suggests...

We propose an evolutionary theory of institutional persistence and change. Many institutional changes are 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, conventional crop shares, inheritance practices, and traditional property rights all are informal insti...