The predominant focus in research on organizations is either on private or public institutions without consistent consideration of their interdependencies. The emphasis in scholarship on private or public interests has strengthened as disciplinary and professional knowledge has deepened:...

This paper analyzes the evolution of U.S. patent law between the first patent act in 1790 and 1870, the passage of the last major patent act of the nineteenth century. During most of the nineteenth century, patent law developed in the courts, and instrumental to this development were a...

Deforestation in the North western part of Pakistan is a long standing problem. The Forestry Department, as formal managers of the forest resources, has been undergoing a long reform process aimed at improving its performance. This reform process has not resulted in less deforestation. From the...

In this paper, the implicit and explicit conceptualizations of international organizations found in the three major theories of international relations are outlined and compared. It turns out that in a neorealist framework, international organizations can be explained; however, they exhibit no...

According to New Institutional Economics, transactional activities, governance structures, institutions and beliefs and values are related hierarchally. Each element must be aligned with the adjacent level for transaction costs to be minimized. This framework is applied to the question of...

Institutional approaches have seen a remarkable revival in social science research within the last decades. In particular New Institutional Economics (NIE) has progressed rapidly over the last years and attracted a considerable deal of attention by social scientists in particular from the...

In spite of its title, in the midst of his numerous achievements, Darwin's book was unable to "solve" the problem of "speciation" that is the problem of the origin of species. We survey the modern biological literature and we argue that it has shown that the laws of structure and change that...

In spite of its title, in the midst of his numerous achievements, Darwin's book was unable to "solve" the problem of "speciation" that is the problem of the origin of species. We survey the modern biological literature and we argue that it has shown that the laws of structure and change that...

This paper aims at describing the choices to be made in selecting and implementing a reform model for the electricity industry and to derive some implications for the situation in Kosovo. The paper argues that the appropriate reform model depends on the circumstances in the considered...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focusses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...