Avner Greif is the Bowman Family Endowed Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University where he teaches economics. He is the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometrics Society, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has published articles in American Political Science Review, European Review of Economic History, Chicago Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Political Economy as well as many edited books. Greif is also a co-author of Analytic Narrative (1998).

Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Introduction; 2. Institutions and transactions; Part II. Institutions as Systems in Equilibria: 3. Private-order contract enforcement institutions: the Maghribi traders coalition; 4. The organizational underpinnings of credible commitment by the state: the Merchant Guild; 5. Endogenous institutions and game-theoretic analysis; Part III. Institutional Dynamics as a Historical Process: 6. A theory of endogenous institutional change; 7. Institutional trajectories: how past institutions affect current ones; 8. Building a state: Genoa's Rise and Fall; 9. Cultural beliefs and the organization of society; Part IV. The Empirical Method of Comparative and Historical Institutional Analysis: 10. The institutional foundations of impersonal exchange; 11. Interactive, context-specific analysis; Part V. Concluding Comments: 12. Institutions, history, and development.