Communities and Markets in Economic Development
本书提出社区是经济体系中与国家和市场并列的第三大组成部分，通过历史案例和博弈论分析，探讨社区如何在没有有效法律机制时，依靠信任、声誉和社会制裁来降低交易成本、促进市场发展。
An analysis of economic systems traditionally focuses on the efficiency or failure of the state and markets. This fascinating book persuasively seeks recognition for the ‘community’ as a third significant component of an economic system. It contains thirteen enlightening chapters by twenty‐one leading scholars from economic history, development economics, agricultural economics, and institutional economics along with an engaging introduction by the editors and concluding comments by Douglass C. North. A community is defined as a mutually identifiable group of people involved in intense, repeated social interactions amongst themselves. In the absence of an effective legal mechanism to protect property rights and enforce contracts, a community can develop informal rules and self‐enforceable norms based on trust, reputation and credible social sanctions to alleviate moral hazard problems. The ability of community institutions to do this at a low cost and enhance market development is the motif of this stimulating book. The essays in the volume are divided into three parts. Part I is entitled ‘Historical and Theoretical Perspectives’. Using game theoretical tools and historical evidence from pre‐modern Europe, Avner Greif provides a typically scintillating analysis of the Community Responsibility System. He shows how, even in the absence of a legal authority with jurisdiction over all parties involved in a transaction, intra‐community enforcement institutions could support inter‐community impersonal exchange up to one’s community affiliation. Why then did such a system ultimately die out and get replaced by a state provided legal system? Various economic, social and political reasons are discussed among which community expansion, increased heterogeneity and the concomitant difficulty of verifiability of one’s community affiliation seem to be the primary culprits. While Greif shows how community norms can aid market development, Robert Allen provides a case study from English agriculture where markets evolved through the destruction of community relationships. The traditional assertion that the movement from open field communities to enclosed farms in England was an inevitable outcome of the superiority of enclosures is thoroughly invalidated by Allen. Open field communities were not noncommercial, inflexible entities resistant to experimentation but were highly innovative and progressive. On the other hand, contrary to accepted wisdom, enclosures did not significantly boost productivity. Allen argues that it was not enclosure that destroyed the community and created markets. Rather, market capitalism and associated social changes destabilised communal relations thus engendering enclosure. Masahiko Aoki’s chapter is an exciting attempt to build a coherent game‐theoretic framework for analysing community norms and the sociological concept of ‘social embeddedness.’ Community norms and institutions are viewed as endogenous, self‐enforceable rules of a repeated game which rely on a reputation mechanism to curtail opportunistic behavior of group members. The analysis and the issues raised are not as simple as the last sentence sounds and much like a good whodunit, the plot thickens as new research ideas and conjectures abound. Social embeddedness is formulated as a linkage between one type of domain (e.g. a commons game) with a social exchange domain. In this framework, even when a self‐regulatory norm is not feasible in an isolated economic transactions domain, if it is embedded in a social exchange domain where the same players generate and enjoy the benefits of significant amounts of social capital, moral hazard problems could still be mitigated by exploiting this linkage. Basically, pooling the incentive constraints of two linked games extenuates the individual incentive constraints of one game. A brilliant complement to this chapter in particular and the entire book in general is Aoki (2001).