Complementary institutions and economic development: An experimental study

This paper considers the problem of why societies develop differently, a question most recently articulated by Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). We follow North (1990) in defining institutions as the “rules of the game in society.” The question then becomes why do some societies develop functional institutions while others do not? To investigate this question, we develop and examine a specific type of dynamic game (which we call an Institutional Game). Our point is that complementarities among the choices that all societies make as they develop can help to answer this question.