New institutional economics (NIE) has been in existence for thirty years and counting. Periodic reassessments of accomplishments, limitations, and unmet needs are useful for a young field such as this. The New Institutional Economics: A Guidebook is such an undertaking.

Having previously written overviews on NIE, I refer interested readers to them. But for a short introductory summary of key ideas and accomplishments of the NIE and some concluding remarks, I have organized the Foreword to this book around provocative passages from each of the chapters. On my reading, the chapters in this book provide corroboration for the proposition that “the new institutional economics is a boiling cauldron of ideas. Not only are there many institutional research programs in progress, but there are competing ideas within many of them” (Williamson 2000, p. 610). That is both the spirit of this guidebook and of my remarks on individual chapters.

The appearance and development of a new institutional economics presupposes a predecessor – to which NIE presumably both relates and differs. The common ground is this: unlike the neoclassical resource allocation paradigm (which focussed on prices and output, supply and demand, and was dismissive of institutions [Reder 1999]), both older- and newer-style institutional economics insisted that institutions matter. The older institutional economics fell on hard times, however, because it lacked a positive research agenda (Stigler 1983, p. 170) and eventually ran itself into the sand. What NIE does that is different is breathe operational content into the study of institutions.