Effective institutions raise the benefits of cooperative solutions or the costs of defection, to use game theoretic terms. - Douglass North

Order in the societies they describe is the result of a dense social network where people have an intimate understanding of each other and the threat of violence is a continuous force for preserving order because of its implications for other members of society.

Karl Marx and Adam Smith both subscribed to this view. They both saw successful growth as dependent on the development of efficient property rights. Their followers appear in the main to have forgotten this.

Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market. (footnote 4: The original contributions were those of Hayek (1937 and 1945)).