The educational platform LearnIOE (www.learnioe.org) is coordinated by the Governance and Regulation Chair at University Paris-Dauphine - PSL Research University in France. It draws on the rich networks of the Institutional and Organizational Economic Academy (IOEA) and the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE) to attract contributing scholars at the research frontier of the academic discipline.
Institutional and Organizational Economics (IOE) is a field of study interested in the economic, political and legal dynamics that drive the organization of firms, industries and markets. It contributes to a better understanding of the levers of economic development and growth and institutional reforms within national, international and global governance systems.
The fundamental insight of IOE is that economic performance is, to large extent, shaped by the institutional frameworks that establish the ‘rules of the game’. Economists, alongside political scientists, historians, legal scholars, specialists in management, sociologists and anthropologists try to understand how these ‘rules of the game’ impact on behaviors, and how they are built and transformed. This research program has implications for many domains in economics and management, and in other social sciences. It is therefore increasingly taught in university curricula.
That said, the field is still young and evolving at a rapid pace. There are (yet) very few reference textbooks or comprehensive and current handbooks for students and faculty. This is the reason why it seems particularly relevant to develop an Internet-based learning platform for IOE. This medium allows the rapid distribution of key concepts and research insights from the field to interested students or practitioners, who may otherwise find only limited resources for self-study. The modular structure of the content allows it to be integrated into broader courses in a flexible way, which we hope will serve to faculty members around the globe who want to include IOE topics in their teaching programs.
The content is made available to everyone, free of charge. We believe that extended access to online materials would benefit a wide set of audiences interested in learning more about the political economy of institutional reforms, the trade-offs in designing regulations and regulatory institutions, or the economic effects of alternative legal designs. This covers students in various social sciences and in management, but also managers in private firms, executive in the public sector, people involved in the design of policies, civic activists, journalists and citizens.
