Suchergebnisse

"In most countries of the world, a sustainable agriculture is both an important and difficult issue. The agricultural sector in Central and Eastern European is confronted by two large problems at the same time: transition processes and sustainability. The purpose of this paper is, in the first place, to make clear that the institutional setting is very important. Second, it gives an overview of the literature on sustainability, institutions and institutional innovation. The phenomenon sustainability encompassing three dimensions: economic, social and environmental. Institutions are not always exogenous and right so that economic agents will behave in the 'correct' (that is efficient) manner. The non-marketable attributes of agricultural land use such as wildlife and landscape and the quality of soil, water and air create market failure. How-ever, they are important for sustainability. With a lack of markets to realise sustainability, there is a strong incentive to develop institutions capable of changing the farmerżs behaviour in ways that will achieve the unachievable via market signals alone. Direct government production is likely to be superior, if the government may not know what it wants and if the contract party has a strong tendency to reduce costs, but this is accompanied by a reduction in (non-contractable) quality. However, in general, both situations do not apply to sustainable agriculture. Type of government intervention has consequence for property rights. Under influence of changes in the institutional environment, the opinion about the protection of the property rights is shifting. The economic valuation of changes in the quality of soil, water, wildlife and landscape depends on if the change taking place either below or above the reference level. From the actual behaviour of the government, it can be concluded that the reference level is being used more and more as a watershed to the question of the allocation of property rights and the use of charges or compensation." (author's abstract)

Norms guide multi-agent systems away from being potentially anarchic towards a coordinated and collaborative society. Institutions provide an explicit, external representation of norms as well as the means to detect violations and other conditions. Each institution can be crafted individually to capture their designers' goals, but this creates a challenge at higher levels of authority in guiding the institutional design to be coordinated with other institutions and not imposing unacceptable limits on agents' rights. We propose to use institutions to govern and to revise institutions, following a principle widely encountered in the social world, where treaties, primary legislation, framework agreements and subsidiarity establish a regulatory space by defining norms on the form of a body of regulation. We set out a formal and computational framework, building on the InstAL model and implementation, to construct tiers of institutions, where the norms at each tier are governed by those at the tier above. Thus, agents' behaviour is governed and monitored by a tier-1 institution, whose norms are governed and monitored by a tier-2 institution, etc. This allows us to check the compliance of an institution with the tier above. Compliance failure generates the necessary negative examples for automatic norm-revision.

In jüngster Zeit wird in den Wirtschafts- und Politikwissenschaften wieder vermehrt auf die Bedeutung der Qualität politischer und ökonomischer Institutionen für die Prosperität von Volkswirtschaften hingewiesen. Dabei erscheint es reizvoll, als bewährt erscheinende Institutionen auf Länder mit institutionellem Reformbedarf zu übertragen. Indes wäre ein Transfer, der den je anderen Bedingungsrahmen nicht berücksichtigt, jedoch möglicherweise wirkungslos oder sogar kontraproduktiv. Dies spricht nicht generell gegen den Transfer von Institutionen, aber es zeigt auf, dass ein solcher Transfer eine komplexe Aufgabe ist, welche eine einfache Herangehensweise nicht zulässt. In diesem Sammelband werden grundlegende Fragen behandelt, die sich im Zusammenhang mit den Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines institutionellen Transfers ergeben. Dabei wird ein weiter Bogen von grundsätzlichen methodologischen Fragen bis hin zu konkreten Beispielen und Forschungsprojekten gespannt