Many institutions, large or small, make their decisions through some process of deliberation. Nonetheless, deliberating institutions often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. Micro mistakes can lead to macro blunders or even catastrophes. There are four such failures; all of them have implication for large-scale institutions as well as small ones. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of an institution's members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Institutions fall victim to cascade effects, as the initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Non-disclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, deliberating institutions sometimes end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating institutions, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that institutions do not learn what their members know. Informational signals and reputational pressure help to explain all four errors. The results can be harmful to numerous institutions, including large ones, and to societies as a whole. Markets are able to correct some of these problems, but cascade effects occur there as well.

This paper is a first attempt to apply a robust political economy framework to explain when Special Economic Zones (SEZs) can contribute to economic development. A robust political economy is one that channels the actions of self-interested individuals with limited information to promote economic progress. In the right institutional context, SEZs tend to promote economic growth. In the wrong institutional context, they can cause resource misallocation and rent-seeking. Policy makers introducing SEZs must overcome the knowledge problem to avoid misdirected economic planning. Yet, the scheme can only fulfill its purpose if it also prevents destructive rent-seeking behavior, both from businesses and from government authorities. The political economy framework of SEZs can be applied to judge their potential efficacy, something that orthodox studies of country features such as natural resources, infrastructure, and zone location fail to do. The Indian and Chinese experiences with SEZs illustrate these points.

This paper addresses the link between the strong inflow of FDI into Russia in the 2000s and its weak institutions, using plant-level data across subnational regions. The findings imply that investors have responded positively to improved quality of institutions in certain regions, which offered a combination of wealth, skills and good infrastructure. High development levels in host regions helped to bypass some institutional shortcomings. Investors from source countries exhibiting comparable institutional environment appeared to be more immune to political conflict. Round-trip investors reacted to institutional determinants in almost the same manner as genuine investors, except for tolerance to labor market imperfections.

Laying the foundations of property rights economics stands out among Ronald Coase's many seminal contributions. This approach had an impact on a number of fields in economics in, particularly, the 1960s and 1970s. The modern body of property rights economics mainly originates in the work Oliver Hart and is quite different in style, scope, and implications from the original property rights economics of Coase, Demsetz, Alchian, Cheung, Umbeck, Barzel, etc. Based on our earlier work on the subject (Foss and Foss, 2001), we argue that the change from Mark I to Mark II property rights economics led to a substantial narrowing of the scope of property rights economics, somewhat akin to a Kuhnian loss of content. In particular, Mark II property rights economics make strong assumptions concerning the definition and enforcement of ownership rights made which lead to many real life institutions and governance arrangements being excluded from consideration, and a much more narrow focus than that of the rich institutional research program initiated by Coase and his followers.

Scholars argue that the New Institutional Economics (NIE) has not yet provided causal explanations on how long institutions persist or why and how they suffer dramatic changes. Others state that evidence is still inconclusive to define a theoretical justification on how changes and development occur. This article focuses on the institutions of the electricity sector in Brazil, aiming to heighten the body of empirical research in NIE and produce satisfactory explanations that motivate theory refinement. Based on a qualitative approach, we find that the drivers of the first institutional change in Brazil's electricity sector were related to market protection and domestic industrial support. For the second institutional change, economic recession (country at state of bankruptcy, debt crisis, and high inflation rates) and reliability of utility services were the driving factors. We hope this study systematizes historical facts and helps create grounds for our understanding of institutional evolution and economic growth.

Over the last three decades entrepreneurship has become a hot topic in economics and management. Much of the entrepreneurship research literature has built upon insights of economists such as Schumpeter, Knight, and Kirzner, each of whom has inspired a distinct strand of entrepreneurship theory and application. Schumpeterian innovation and Kirznerian alertness are the best-known concepts of entrepreneurship, but a newer research stream is building on Knight's idea of entrepreneurship as judgmental decision-making under uncertainty. What we call the judgment-based view models entrepreneurs as owning, controlling, and combining heterogeneous assets, which differ in their attributes, and deploying these assets within a firm to produce goods and services in anticipation of economic profit. This Forum presents three papers that develop, extend, and challenge the judgment-based view of entrepreneurship, focusing on the foundations of judgment, the processes of entrepreneurial resource assembly, and the relationship between the judgment-based view and other theories of economic organization.

‘The Problem of Social Cost’ (Coase, 1960) asserts a normative role for the common law judge, that of taking into account the economic consequences of his decisions in allocating property rights. This position is often accused of inconsistency: Coase sees the figure of the judge as willing and able to improve economic efficiency, but criticises the actors of public intervention, particularly regulators, for being fallible, vulnerable to political pressures, and lacking information. I shall show that Coase's giving this role to the judge stems precisely from his criticism of public intervention. This means that his figure of the judge escapes the tenets of the theoretical system that first rendered it necessary. Various reasons could explain this difference of treatment as between the judge and the other figures of public intervention in Coase's system, but Coase makes too strong an opposition between common law on one side and regulatory and statutory law on the other, and leaves unexplained the motivation of judges.

In this contribution, we address the introduction of private property rights and market trades in the use of the radio frequency spectrum. We discuss the UK case being inspired by the ideas of Coase. We discuss how an appropriate design of property rights and a secondary market would look like and how the developments after the introduction of property rights could be interpreted. Subsequently we present the alternative perspective of Commons to illuminate the implications of a Coasean perspective. It is shown how Coase's focus is on efficiency, whereas in the world of Commons, the societal value is central. We discuss how the two perspectives can contribute to the understanding of the governance of the radio spectrum and conclude with policy recommendations.

Doctor-patient jokes are universally popular because of the information asymmetries within the diagnostic relationship. We contend that entrepreneurial diagnosis is present in markets where consumers are unable to diagnose their own problems and, instead, rely on the entrepreneur to diagnose them. Although it is widely recognized that consumers face information asymmetries over price comparison and quality assessment, little attention has been given to information asymmetries regarding individual customers’ needs. This has led to the economic contribution of the diagnostic entrepreneur being overlooked. Entrepreneurial diagnosis is a cognitive skill possessed by the entrepreneur. It is a subset of entrepreneurial judgment and can be modeled. The model shows that in order to exploit opportunities it is often necessary for entrepreneurs to invest in market-making activities, such as customer-focused diagnostic services, backed up by credible reputations for competence and integrity. While diagnostic entrepreneurship is particularly important in knowledge-intensive service industries (such as medicine) it is important in all industries whenever radical product innovation occurs (e.g. modern computers and phones). Successful commercialization of innovation often requires, not only new technology, but diagnostic entrepreneurship too.

The effects of a truly uncertain future are more far-reaching than what has traditionally been assumed in transaction cost economics (TCE). Uncertain governance choices require that agents exercise judgment in the absence of other means of estimating the payoffs associated with complex combinations of transaction attributes, contractual contingencies, and governance structures. Judgments are made on an experimental basis to incrementally improve actors’ heterogeneous cognitive representations of the contractual landscape. I argue that uncertain governance choices are subject to specific decision-biases that interact with the potentially corrective function of current organization and asymmetries in actors’ access to decision-supporting systems. These asymmetries may affect the contracting parties’ preferences over differential governance structures. Specifically, by overestimating individual unbiased rationality and disregarding how access to decision-supporting systems may affect governance choice, TCE runs the risk of underestimating the degree of vertical integration in actual firms.

Entrepreurship theory within economics has long touted the importance of judgment in entrepreneurial action. More recently, proponents have begun to advocate extension of this work to organization studies. However, critics of entrepreneurial judgment have responded by claiming that the construct is only meaningful post hoc and vapid when examined ex ante. Instead, they claim that, if entrepreneurship theory is to progress, then judgment must be replaced by a process logic known as effectuation. This article examines their claims and redefines the judgment dilemma as one of scope rather than existence. Empathic accuracy is then introduced to offer a means of addressing their criticism without having to deny the existence of entrepreneurial judgment. Empathic accuracy is also shown to be capable of explaining some of the cognitive mechanisms necessary for effectuation and dynamic socio-economic order.