The working parts of rules and how they may evolve over time

Drawing on extensive research related to successful and unsuccessful efforts to govern common-pool resources, I wish to address what I consider to be the next important step in our theoretical understanding of complex settings. I address how we can identify the working parts of rules. It is difficult to study the evolution of institutions without a clear language for describing and analyzing the underlying working parts creating markets, governments at all levels, private property, and structures inside individual firms. Thus, this paper identifies the rules underlying institutional games so that we can study their evolution