The present paper begins with the well-traveled notion of institutions as “the rules of the game”
and seeks to give some conceptual concreteness to the idea of rules in order to understand
what it means to break the rules. While rules certainly channel and constrain behavior, and in
principle require some actions and prohibit others, deviations from these requirements and
prohibitions do occur. In addition, rules may be “interpreted,” and the rules, themselves, do
change—what humans devise they may revise. With all this conceptual movement, are the rules
of the game too wobbly a foundation for the study of institutions?
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