Covenants with and without a sword: self-governance is possible

TL;DR: This article investigated 3-and 5-year-old German children's understanding of promise breaking in prosocial (helping someone else) and selfish (playing with someone else), and found that 5-and 3-yearolds preferred others' promise-breaking more in selfish than prosocial conditions.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce and discuss five different formal approaches regarding their adequateness for socio-economic analysis: the Social Fabric Matrix Approach, the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, System Dynamics, (Evolutionary) Game Theory and Agent Based Computational Modelling.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the mere knowledge that sanctions might be assigned increases cooperation among the members of the subject pool; subjects expect that non-strategic sanctioning occurs against the free riders.

TL;DR: In this paper , a common-pool resource experiment with small-scale fishers in Thailand was conducted to explore the role of socio-economic factors and how these factors interact with ecological conditions facing fishers.

TL;DR: The Economic Institutions of Capitalism as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work in the field of economic institutions of capitalism. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 528-530.

Abstract: In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss common property resource management. This conference was a watershed in the development of the theoretical underpinning of institutional design for successful common pool resource (CPR) management. Since then, an international network of over 2,000 researchers has developed, and the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), formed in 1989, has held two successful international conferences. Dominating the intellectual evolution of the field has been the work of Elinor Ostrom, co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Her book, Governing the Commons, presents a lucid exposition of the current state of institutional analysis of common property problems. Part of the Cam-bridge series on Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, the book addresses how common pool resources may be managed successfully without falling prey to the "tragedy of the commons." Common pool resources are characterized by subtractability (i.e., withdrawal by one user reduces the amount of the resource left for other users) and joint use by a group of appropriators. Thus, a common village grazing field has forage for a limited number of beasts, and all the villagers are entitled to pasture their animals on the field. Community rules of access and management are required to sustain the field from season to season. Problems in managing CPRs arise when the rational individual determines that he will still have access to the resource even if he does not fully contribute to its maintenance (the "free rider" problem). An extensive literature discusses the effect of free riders, concluding that common pool resources will inevitably fall into ruin. One of two solutions is usually offered to avoid this problem: centralized governmental regulation or privatization. Noting the numerous occasions in which common pool resources are managed successfully with neither centralized governmental control nor privatization, Ostrom argues for a third approach to resolving the problem of the commons: the design of durable cooperative institutions that are organized and governed by the resource users. In Governing the Commons she examines small-scale common-pool resources. Resource user groups examined range in size from 50-15,000 people who rely substantially on the common pool resource for their economic well-being. She has further