Market and government failures in historical institutional analysis by Douglass C. North and Avner Greif

Economic historians Douglass C. North and Avner Greif use the tools on the New Institutional Economics and Game Theory and draw the attention of economists to the fact that both markets and governments are institutional constructs created by opportunistic individuals and groups with different interests. In contrast with standard economic approaches, from the historical-institutional point of view it is the efficiency of some markets and governments should be treated as “deviations” from a norm and states of “failure” – as a starting points in analyses of markets and governments.