Alternative Institutions

Many of these proposals were first aired on the AltInst mailing list.

Go here to find out how to add your proposal or critique to this page.

Other listings containing many alternative institutions

• Global Ideas Bank, listing over 1000 ideas. Awarded AltInst Social Innovation Award, 1996.
• Yahoo on Alt. Education
• Yahoo on Alt. Society and Culture

Proposals and Critiques

On the Web

Mine

• Let federal tax rates vary by congressional district, to cut incentive for pork.
• Tax leisure by checking at random times whether each person is working for wages.
• Use regressions, not GPA or average evaluation, to determine student and teacher ability.
• Vote on values, but bet on beliefs.
• Allow Private Law, Subject to Anti-Trust Regulation
• Have your doctor lose a lot of money when you die.
• Give criminals control of private law enforcement.
• Use web spiders to follow links backwards.
• Use a random payment scheme to equalize conversation time.
• Divide chores equally but flexibly by playing "tug-o-war".
• Pay people who help "angels" who pretend to need help
• Choose an agent who can forbid you from doing "irrational" things
• Voluntarily contract for no-fault accident law.
• Pick a jury at random to decide an election,
• Reform academia with betting markets on science claims
• Form Eco-consensus via long-term commodity futures markets.
• Let market prices of called-off stock trades tell you when to dump a company's CEO.
• Let people sue for compensation for hard-to-bargain-for help they gave others.
• Minimal Private Law
• Instead of banning products, have regulators label them as "would have banned".
• Estimate quality of life from willingness to move to a standardized island.
• Have journalists give numerical confidence estimates in their science stories.
• Let of each have a personal "party talk" email list.
• Let those who sue gamble their suits, double or nothing.

Other's

• Financing of Litigation by Sale of Lawsuit Shares
• VoteSmart
• Market-Adjusted Options For Executive Compensation,
• Use median vote to set amount of pollution rights sold.
• Limit the number of terms Congress folks can serve.
• Have voters declare their vote as a function of all possible votes of everyone else.
• Redraw electoral district boundaries with "objective" computer programs.
• Use per-capita benefit caps rather block grants
• critique of flat tax
• Hold auctions where people can bid on packages of items,
• Use digital cash to let people trade on the internet
• A World Government
• Voting by Phone
• Approval voting - vote for as many candidates as you like.
• Govt. Funded Right to Work.
• A club using psychological tests to choose candidates to endorse

In Journals

• Let people sell their right to sue for personal injury, Marc Shukaitis, "A Market In Personal Injury Tort Claims", J. Legal Studies, V16, 1987.
• "Alternatives to Zoning: Covanents, Nuisance Rules, and Fines as Land Use Controls", Robert C. Ellickson, 40, U. Chicago Law Review, pp.681-781 (1973). See also Robert Cooter, "Towards A Market in Unmatured Tort Claims," 75 University of Virginia Law Review 383 (1989), with comments by Schwartz and Goetz.
• Auction the right to be a monopolist and to be paid an estimate of consumer surplus, Martin Loeb and Wesley Magat, "A Decentralized Method for Utility Regulation", J. Law and Econ., V22, p399-404. 1979
• Tax using a quadratic function of how much people say they want a public good, so that everyone wants to be honest. Theodore Groves and John O. Ledyard, "Optimal Allocation of Public Goods: A Solution to the `Free Rider' Problem", Econometrica 45:4, pp783-809, May 1977.
• Pick the submited political district boundaries which is the most "compact", using some compactness function, William Vickrey, "On The Prevention of Gerrymandering", Political Science Quarterly 76, p105, 1961. (See criticism.)
• Use a basket of many standardized and easy-to-transport commodities as a medium of exchange, or as a money of account for long-term contracts. Alfred Marshall, Money, Credit, and Commerce, p.36, 1923.
• Let people agree to let their life insurance company sell their organs when they die. Henry Hansmann, "The Economics and Ethics of Markets for Human Organs", Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 14:57, 1989.