The Digital Revolution and Institutional Change
Will be published approx. on 31. December 2026
Book
Hardback
250 pages
978-1-009-74290-0 (ISBN)
Description
Digital technologies are reorganizing economies, politics, crime, and international relations faster than existing theories can explain. Rather than treating these changes as separate phenomena, The Digital Revolution and Institutional Change offers a unified framework for understanding how digital innovation reshapes social organization across domains. Drawing on institutional economics, it shows how property rights, transaction costs, and incomplete mental models shape both the adoption of new technologies and society's often flawed responses to them. It argues that international contracting and collective action routinely fails to address the unintended consequences of technological progress and explains why these failures are not accidental but structural. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on New Institutional Economics, this book is the first to analyse the digital revolution from the perspective of the economics of institutions, reframing how we think about technological change in the digital age.
More details
Person
Thrainn Eggertsson is emeritus economics professor at the University of Iceland. He was adjunct professor Hertie School, Berlin (2011-19), Global Distinguished Professor New York University (2011-2019) and was President of International Society for New Institutional Economics 2007-2008. Eggertsson is the author of Imperfect Institutions: Possibilities and Limits of Reforms (2005), Economic Behavior and Institutions (1990), and co-edited with Lee J. Alston and Douglass C. North Empirical Studies in Institutional Change (1996).
Content
1. Introduction to Technology and Institutions in Economic Thought; 2. Technology, Transaction Costs, and Economic Property Rights; 3. Measurement, Communication, and Organization; 4. Possessing Knowledge: Intellectual Property Rights; 5. Digitizing the Economy; 6. Four Emerging Digital Technologies and Economic Organization: Blockchain, 3D Printing, Robotics, and Quantum Computing; 7. Crime, Warfare, and Digital Technology; 8. Digital Technology and Freedom: Democratic States and Authoritarian Regimes; 9. Digital Future on Earth and in Space.