Elinor Ostrom

Quotes From

One of the essential elements of copyright—the right to control reproduction—works as expected in the world of traditional media, where there is an obvious distinction between access and reproduction and where the copyright owner’s control of reproduction provides just that. But in the digital world, where no access is possible except by copying, complete control of copying would mean control of access as well.#

While utility was originally conceived of as a way of combining a diversity of external values on a single internal scale, in practice it has come to be equated with one externalized unit of measure—such as expected profits.#

Institutional analysis that simply posits an external, zero-cost enforcer has not addressed the possibility that the rules devised by appropriators may themselves have a major effect on the costs, and therefore the efficiency, of monitoring by internal or external enforcers.#
A previously unrecognized “private” benefit of monitoring in settings in which information is costly is that one obtains the information necessary to adopt a contingent strategy.#

Inside and Outside Perspectives on Institutions: An Economic Theory of the Noble Lie
If there exist no incentive or selective mechanisms that make cooperation in large groups incentive-compatible under realistic circumstances, functional social institutions will require a divergence between subjective preferences and objective payoffs – a “noble lie”. This implies the existence of irreducible and irreconcilable “inside” and “outside” perspectives on social institutions; . . .
Bootstrapping Social Cooperation
Social cooperation is the major thing to be explained in both sociobiology and economics. From the perspective of the former, most species never achieve it at all. From the perspective of the latter, most societies never get very far along compared to the advanced Western societies of the modern world. One . . .
Evonomics - How About Evopolitics Too?
David S Wilson says we need to ditch Hayek’s politics in order to save his evolutionary insights. On the contrary, the argument in The Road to Serfdom follows straightforwardly from Wilson’s own premises if you take an evolutionary perspective on politics as well as the economy. The basic problem is . . .