We develop a formal approach to the emergence of institutionalized trust in the context of the evolution of cooperation, with a particular focus on the relevance of the size dimension of this process. While trust in general has been widely investigated, as has the size dimension of structural...

The original institutionalist theory of institutional change as elaborated by Paul D. Bush (1987) in the traditions of Veblen, Ayres and J.F. Foster (called here the VAFB-paradigm), provides a most important theoretical and empirical device for critical institutional analysis, with its...

Transaction cost economics explains organizations in a simplistic ‘market-vs.-hierarchy’ dichotomy. In this view, complex real-world coordination forms are simply considered ‘hybrids’ of those ‘pure’ and ideal forms, thus being located on a one-dimensional ‘line’ between them....