Rules in homeless communities: an institutional analysis

In this thesis, we are interested in rules of coexistence among homeless persons in Prague. At first, we will generally describe the emergence of order in society then we will focus on informal institutions and various ways how to enforce them. Subsequently, we will turn our attention to the topic of homelessness. We will provide a definition of homelessness suitable for our purposes and describe functioning of informal social networks that emerged among homeless people in different parts of the world. This will lead us to the empirical part of the thesis, which is based on unstructured interviews and results in description of ob- served regularities and enforcement mechanisms connected to them. For some of those regularities, we will use game theoretical approach to explain how did they emerge and how are they sustained. Keywords: homelessness, informal institutions, institutional analysis, game theory, private enforcement Author's e-mail: matej.ehrlich@gmail.com Supervisor's e-mail: jiri.schwarz@gmail.co