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The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible contributions of blockchain technology to creating new governance structures that facilitate social cooperation.

Conceptual analysis with key ideas in new institutional economics and political theory is used in this paper.

Blockchain technology provides a new tool through which political entrepreneurs can credibly alienate some of their power within a system of rules that they have established.

This paper links discussion of blockchain entrepreneurship in commercial markets to research into private governance.

The purpose is to assess the impact of online platforms on the sex industry, focusing specifically on direct sex work, and evaluate what approaches to platform regulation is likely to align with the interests of sex workers.

The paper presents a review of interdisciplinary conceptual and empirical literature on sex work combined with analysis of key issues using a transaction cost framework.

Online platforms generally make sex work safer. Regulation aimed at preventing platforms from serving sex workers is likely to harm their welfare.

Regulation of online platforms should take great care to differentiate coercive sex from consensual sex work, and allow sex workers to experiment with governance mechanisms provided by entrepreneurs.

The paper demonstrates how a transactions costs approach to market behaviour as applied to personal services like ridesharing can also shed light on the challenges that sex workers face, partly as a result of criminalisation, and the dangers of over-regulation.

Robust political economy (RPE) is a research program that combines insights from Austrian economics and public choice to evaluate the performance of institutions in cases of limited knowledge and limited altruism, or “worst-case scenarios.” Many critics of RPE argue that it is too narrowly focused on the bad motivations and inadequacies of social actors while smuggling in classical liberal normative commitments as part of a purported solution to these problems. This chapter takes a different tack by highlighting the ways that RPE as currently understood may not be robust against particularly bad conduct. It suggests that depending on the parameters of what constitutes a worst-case scenario, classical liberal institutions, especially a minimal state, may turn out to be less robust than some conservative or social democratic alternatives.

This chapter is the editor’s introduction to Austrian Economics: The Next Generation, which includes a brief description of the workshop that produced the papers and short summaries of each contribution organized by sub-topic.