Beyond market failure and government failure

Furton, Glenn; Martin, Adam

doi:10.1007/s11127-018-0623-4

Cited by 46 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 89 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Hence, the logic of the dynamic nature of goods and its theoretical, empirical, and policy implications open up new avenues for policy research. It may be beneficial to extend the line of inquiry to uncover institutional details, constitutional rules, and specific governance structures within a polycentric framework that would allow for institutional malleability and adaptability such that ‘institutional matching’ may be possible that enables us to map out specific classes of institutions suited to the goods or services in question (Furton and Martin, 2019).…”

Section: Concluding Remarks and Areas Of Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ostroms and the contestable nature of goods: beyond taxonomies and toward institutional polycentricity

Rayamajhee

Paniagua

2020

Journal of Institutional Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper builds on the Ostroms' oeuvre to suggest that the binary Samuelsonian taxonomy of goods – or the ‘sterile dichotomy’, as Elinor Ostrom calls it – cannot serve as a reliable guide for public policy. Using the Ostroms' insights on co-production, institutional matching, and polycentricity, we argue that the ‘inherent’ nature of goods and their specific taxonomy are not static and definitive concepts but are instead contestable and dynamic features that are institutionally contingent. We explore four crucial mechanisms and/or contexts, not altogether unrelated, whereby the nature of goods becomes contestable and malleable: namely, (1) technological and geographical factors, (2) coproduction and entrepreneurial ingenuity, (3) bundling and unbundling of services, and (4) ideologies and regime shifts. This exercise has twofold purposes. First, we generalize the notion that there is nothing ‘inherent’ in the nature of goods and services and that they are fluid, heterogeneous, and malleable concepts. Second, we contribute to the debate on the provision of public goods and the role of civil society by highlighting the need for institutional malleability and diversity adaptive to changing technology, contexts, and institutional conditions.

show abstract

Section: Concluding Remarks and Areas Of Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ostroms and the contestable nature of goods: beyond taxonomies and toward institutional polycentricity

Rayamajhee

Paniagua

2020

Journal of Institutional Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One of the key advantages claimed in favor of public regulation is the capacity of states to discover and disseminate rational, scientific management techniques to solve optimally all the various problems that private actors produce. On an appreciative account, this optimism about the knowledge and motivation of actors within a centralized political process should be tempered (Furton and Martin 2019). Democratic decision processes are vulnerable to opportunism such that controlling majorities or well-organized minorities can channel public resources to support their private interests (Buchanan and Tullock 1999;Meadowcroft 2014).…”

Section: Appreciative Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ostrom, Floods and Mismatched Property Rights

Cowen

2020

International Journal of the Commons

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem-particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense in Britain and popular outcries during the regular occasions that the British government fails to protect property and land during heavy rains. Traditional approaches to institutional analysis suggest that flood management is either a public good that only the government is competent to provide or a private good to which individual landowners are ultimately responsible for supplying. We argue that an important cause of failure in flood management is mismatched property rights. This is where the scale of natural events and resources fail to align with the scale of human activities, responsibility and ownership. Moreover, the spatial dimensions of floods mean that their management is often appropriately conceptualized as a common pool resource problem. As a result, commons institutions as conceptualized and observed by Elinor Ostrom are likely to be major contributors to effective flood management. What governance process should decide the size and scope of these institutions? We argue that bottom-up responses to problems of mismatched property rights are facilitated within larger societies that are characterized by market processes. Moreover, the wider presence of price signals delivers to local communities essential knowledge about the cost of maintaining private property and the relative scarcity of the communal goods. We discuss how our theoretical positions align with experience in Britain and what the implications of our theoretical approach are for facilitating the development of better institutions.

show abstract

“…& Fourth, both the IS approach and Austrian economics are sceptical about standard neoclassical accounts of market failure, arguing that notions such as perfect competition and Pareto efficiency fail to do justice to the significance of markets as dynamic processes of discovery through which people learning about new goods, preferences and technologies (Hayek 1948, [Hayek 1968Metcalfe 2005: 54-60, Metcalfe 2007. Indeed, at least some exponents of both approaches have argued that there ought to be a departure from the idea that policy should aim for some ideal or optimal state of affairs, rejecting the notion of market or system 'failure' as presupposing an unrealistic and so unattainable benchmark in favour of a more comparative approach that seeks to compare the capacity of different systems of rules to deal with system 'problems' (Chaminde and Edquist 2010: 101-05, 108;Bergek et al 2010;Lewis 2013;Furton and Martin 2019). & Fifth, and most significantly for what follows, like Austrians such as Hayek, the IS approach conceptualises the economy as a complex (innovation) system.…”

Section: Comparison With Austrian Economicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Innovation Systems Approach: An Austrian and Ostromian Perspective

Lewis

2020

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The innovation systems (IS) approach-developed by Richard Nelson, Christopher Freeman and Bengt-Ake Lundvall, amongst others-has become perhaps the dominant approach in the academic literature for the study of innovation. It has also exerted considerable influence on policy. This paper examines both the theory underpinning the IS approach, which bears considerable affinities with Austrian economics, and also its policy implications. It is argued that the work of Friedrich Hayek and Elinor Ostrom in particular can be used to draw attention to some potential difficulties with the way in which the IS approach is often used to guide policy. Ideas drawn from Austrian economics, as well as the work of Elinor Ostrom, are used to help develop and improve the IS approach, both theoretically and in terms of its approach to policy.

show abstract

Beyond market failure and government failure

Cited by 46 publications

References 89 publications

The Ostroms and the contestable nature of goods: beyond taxonomies and toward institutional polycentricity

The Ostroms and the contestable nature of goods: beyond taxonomies and toward institutional polycentricity

Ostrom, Floods and Mismatched Property Rights

The Innovation Systems Approach: An Austrian and Ostromian Perspective

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About