This spring, Silicon Flatirons brought law professors from around the country to the CU Law School in Boulder, CO for a one-day seminar on New Institutional Economics (“NIE”)
This spring, Silicon Flatirons brought law professors from around the country to the CU Law School in Boulder, CO for a one-day seminar on New Institutional Economics (“NIE”). Over 40 law professors and practitioners came to hear presentations on NIE and topics affecting it from consumer behavior to intellectual property.
NIE examines how institutions–formal legal rules and informal social norms–govern the behavior of individuals and firms as well as how organizations use governance rules to operate effectively (or not). Significantly, NIE provides scholars with the necessary tools to examine how institutions and organizations operate in practice, eschewing theory for theory’s sake, and thus has motivated the use of experimental economics to test the impact of different legal rules.
The seminar provided the participants with an accessible and engaging account of what NIE is about and how it offers an insightful analytical framework. The modular seminar included an interactive discussion where all participants examined case studies to evaluate the payoffs of using NIE and experimental economics to evaluate the merits of different legal regimes.