Introduction

New institutional economics (NIE) studies institutions and how institutions interact with organizational arrangements. Institutions are the written and unwritten rules, norms and constraints that humans devise to reduce uncertainty and control their environment. These include (i) written rules and agreements that govern contractual relations and corporate governance, (ii) constitutions, laws and rules that govern politics, government, finance, and society more broadly, and (iii) unwritten codes of conduct, norms of behavior, and beliefs. Organizational arrangements are the different modes of governance that agents implement to support production and exchange. These include (i) markets, firms, and the various combinations of forms that economic actors develop to facilitate transactions and (ii) contractual agreements that provide a framework for organizing activities, as well as (iii) the behavioral traits that underlie the arrangements chosen. In studying institutions and their interaction with specific arrangements, new institutionalists have become increasingly concerned with mental models and other aspects of cognition that determine how humans interpret reality, which in turn shape the institutional environment they build (North 1990, p. 3–6; Williamson 2000).