A Naive View of Electronic Institutions

This chapter explains the intuitions behind electronic institutions. The first objective is to introduce the ideas and terminology that are the foundations of their conceptual model. The second objective is to give an indication of the usefulness of these systems. For these purposes a particular traditional institution — the fish market that still takes place in fishing villages in Europe — is used to show how we elaborated the notion of electronic institution and also to illustrate how the electronic version of that conventional institution may be specified. Finally, this chapter contains some generic indications of how electronic institutions may be used and some examples that complement the ones that constitute the rest of this book.