Published as Feeny, David, "Sub-Optimality and Transaction Costs on the Commons," in Edna Tusak Loehman and D. Marc Kilgour (eds.), Designing Institutions for Environmental and Resource Management (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, Ltd., 1998), 124-141. "Much of the literature on the...

"We are concerned here with the creation of non-market institutions for reducing the cost of risk in poor agrarian societies that operate at low levels of technology without the benefits of insurance, credit and other intertemporal markets. 1 Institutions, the formal and informal rules that...