New institutional economic theories of non-profits and cooperatives: a critique from an evolutionary perspective

Traditional economic theories of social enterprises rely on new institutional economics. Although these theories have an undeniable explanatory power, they display a series of non-negligible flaws. Evolutionary and complexity approaches in economics may help overcome these limits. The object of this article is, in a first time, to review the different new institutional theories applied to non-profits and cooperatives and, in a second time, to present some criticisms addressed to new institutional economics. We concentrate on two controversial aspects of the latter: on the one hand, its underlying hypotheses about individuals and, in particular, bounded rationality and opportunism; on the other hand, its neglect of the emergent and evolving nature of economic phenomena and of the importance of history and the environment in agents’ institutional choices. For each criticism, we make proposals, mainly inspired by evolutionary and complexity approaches in economics, in order to overcome these limits.