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.

In a work rich with insights from anthropology and neoclassical economics, Kathryn Firmin-Sellers exposes an important, ubiquitous dilemma facing developing countries in the transition from customary land tenure systems to potentially more productive private property rights systems. The dilemma is that this productive potential of a property rights system depends not only on how the rights are assigned but also on the degree to which the rights can be and are enforced. Private property rights will only inspire significant individual investment and/or economic growth if political institutions convey to the ruler of a community or nation sufficient coercive authority to silence any who advocate alternative, perhaps politically attractive, allocations of property rights. Nevertheless, once they are vested with such coercive authority, institutions must also create political incentives for rulers to establish a credible commitment to enforce those rights, rather than to use their coercive authority to implement distributionally more favorable systems of rights. However, in transitional societies the institutions themselves are “up for grabs, ” frequently being created by the same rulers for whom the institutions must establish the conditions for credible commitment.