Recent developments on the matter highlight the central question of institutional dynamics.  From a theoretical point of view, a refining of our understanding of what institutions are and of the very nature of the different components of an institutional framework requires theories of how institutions emerge and how they evolve, of how institutional systems become progressively independent of those who play various games to intentionally design institutional components, of how the convergence of anticipations, beliefs, behaviors result or not in “rules of the game”, of how pre-existing institutional settings constrain the implementation of new rules and new enforcement mechanisms, etc.  In an applied perspective, in order to understand and, if this is possible, to manage institutional changes, it is clearly essential to dig more deeply into the complex interdependences between various institutional components, the potential phenomena hindering or blocking institutional changes, or to the opposite the chains of causality between micro-changes and macro-transformations, the interplay between formal and informal institutional dimensions.

Over the past years, many pieces of research have been exploring some of the many dimensions of theses complex issues.  For instances, economics history and the economics of development made substantial progress in analyzing the factors and processes of institutional transformation in the perspective of economic growth and development (or the lack of).  The economics of transition together with the analysis of regulatory reforms accumulated a lot of evidences regarding the interplay between various sources of authority in the conflicts for repartition of wealth that play a strong role in any process of institutional transformation.  The economics of knowledge, the developing field of economics and psychology and experimental economics also provided many analyses that are potentially useful to understand the role played by institutions in the development of human capabilities and in the framing of human behaviors.  Of course, the so called new-institutional economics, and many other sister sub-disciplines like law and economics, new political economy developed a lot of contributions as well, especially on the actual outcomes of alternative institutional settings on individual and collective behaviors. These findings are of importance for the understanding of the strategies at play in an institutional system and of the way their combinations result in institutional evolutions.

This is the reason why it seems appropriate to organize a workshop on the dynamics of institutions aimed at taking stock of the progresses made in various literatures over the years to identify the commonalities, to point the components of the analysis on which agreements could be reached, to stress the issues that deserve better exploration, to compare the methodologies and the paths along with the analysis should be developed.  Among the research questions, which should be at the core of the workshops topics, are:

• How do institutions emerge and how institutional changes occur?  What are the potential factors hindering institutional changes, and those inducing transformations?  How to understand both institutional change and stability? What are the factors influencing the pace of change?
• To what extent intentionality plays a role in institutional evolutions?  Can institutional systems be designed?  Can institutional change be decided?  How conflicts of interest, cognitive biases, and behavioral constraints can be overcome (or not) to collectively act to “manage” institutional evolutions?
• If people can act on their institutions, why do they ‘choose’ to stick to bad institutions?  If they can’t switch to a better institutional environment, is it because they cannot reach an agreement on the target?  Is it because they cannot coordinate to reach it?  Is it because switching costs are too high?  More systematic replies should be provided to these questions.

The workshop will undertake to feed these questions by discussing discuss the different conceptions and analysis in the field of the dynamics of institutions and identify the agenda of the research in this domain.  It will take place in Paris in autumn 2008.  In particular, it will focus on the following points:

• Analysis of the different tools and methods that are developed in the analysis of institutions.  The spectrum is rather large, from empirical and ‘historical’ methods, field experiments and experimental economics to game theory.  A systematic assessment of potential and shortcoming of alternative methods as well as the potentiality of their combination should be carried out.
• Analysis of the alternative conceptions of institutions and institutional framework.  Most definition of institutions relies on the idea that they are the rules of the game on which individual agents cannot directly act.  It is however essential to refine this analysis to understand how individual strategies impact on institutional changes through a wide set of means: imitation, constraints, hierarchical power, bypassing, innovation, etc.
• Analysis of institutional complementarities: Institutions might also be conceived as different sub-institutions (legal, political, etc.) that interact.  The problem is to look precisely at the way these different components interact and to explain both their specific logic of evolutions and the way interdependences among institutional components influence the pace and path of institutional evolutions.

The papers discussed during the workshop will be published in a special issue of a major journal.