This study examines how meso-level institutions within Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems guide farmers’ deliberative preferences for collective adaptation to saltwater inundation in the Philippines and Viet Nam. Specifically, the paper investigates three mechanisms of meso-institutional influence: legitimacy creation, belief formation, and social enforcement that shape farmers’ collective adaptation. Using multinomial logistic regression with cluster-robust standard errors on survey data from rice farmers, results show that institutional embeddedness depends on both physical exposure and socioeconomic capacity; information access enhances belief accuracy and collective preferences in contexts where institutional trust is high; and legitimacy-based feasibility significantly strengthens support for collective measures. Findings also show country differences in managing high-externality adaptation measures, with only Viet Nam exhibiting sensitivity to institutional quality at higher externality levels. Comparative results reveal that autonomous, participatory meso-institutions in the Philippines generate stronger deliberative preferences and more cohesive collective adaptation than state-centred structures in Viet Nam.

Medieval lex mercatoria refers to the customary commercial law developed by merchants to govern cross-border trade, operating alongside and sometimes independently of territorial legal systems. This paper compares that historical form of autonomous ordering with contemporary blockchain governance. Both create institutional frameworks that facilitate exchange among diverse actors and provide mechanisms that function, to varying degrees, outside traditional state authority. The key difference lies in how rules are generated and enforced: medieval merchant law relied on flexible norms interpreted by merchant courts and other human adjudicators, whereas blockchain systems seek to reduce ambiguity by encoding rules ex ante in smart contracts and automating enforcement. Decentralized decision-making and emerging forms of on-chain adjudication further reimagine dispute resolution without centralized judicial power. The central claim is that both represent polycentric legal orders whose significance ultimately depends on how they interact with, complement, or challenge formal governmental institutions.

In behavioural economics, sludge is a novel umbrella term (introduced by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler) referring to the subjectively experienced excessive frictions in decision-making. Sludge researchers propose incorporating insights from institutional economics by linking sludge to subjective transaction costs that align with the subjectivist tradition in transaction cost theory. However, sludge research relies entirely on the i-frame: an individualistic and internalist (inside-the-brain) notion of decision-making. Although popular, the i-frame results in critical shortcomings and contradictions in sludge analysis. In contrast, I propose a systemic (s-frame) perspective for studying sludge. Along with a subjectivist view, sludge should be understood as an outcome of complex and evolving rule systems. Instead of focusing solely on the cost side of sludge, sludge analysis should be developed to include not only transaction costs but also transaction benefits that are unevenly distributed among heterogeneous actors. Furthermore, decision-making and sludge perception are not purely internal processes but socially extended cognitive processes governed by cognitive institutions and embedded in dynamic social interactions. Shifting the focus of sludge research toward the s-frame will allow us to understand sludge in all its institutional and socio-cognitive complexities.

This Comment assesses the legacy of the 2015 JOIE debate, critiquing the economic conflation of de jure ‘property’ and de facto ‘possession’. Citation analysis confirms the debate’s sustained intellectual footprint, but this did not translate into the lexical shift advocated by its proponents. A text-mining analysis of 58 economics journals finds negligible adoption of the specific term ‘possession’. A broader test for a conceptual basket of related de facto terms also fails to find robust evidence; a fragile signal in one dataset, not replicated in a second. We conclude that no significant, profession-wide lexical adoption occurred.