The Cambridge series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions is built around attempts to answer two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices, and How do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The scope of the series is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American, and the focus is positive rather than normative.

Murray Horn has combined his academic insight and practical experience to fashion a major advance in transactions cost theories of institutional design. He starts with a frequently described situation in which issue complexity and the consequent desire to take advantage of specialization lead representative assemblies to rely on the opinions and actions of bureaucratic agents. Since the exchanges between legislators and their constituents are typically not simultaneous (flows of benefits to legislators are often more immediate than to constituents), he argues that legislators when creating agency missions need to add durability to their deals with forward-looking constituents by protecting the agency against subsequent legislative modification, while protecting themselves against agency actions detrimental to legislative interests.

Horn theorizes that enacting coalitions in this situation design agencies by solving an instrument assignment problem to minimize the transaction costs they face.