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This paper advances and defends the proposition that the basis for the evolution of institutions is the evolution and competition of ideas in the public sphere. This is based on a deeper proposition that institutions are ideas and ideas become institutions. We draw on the ‘Brisbane School’ of evolutionary/institutional economics and of behavioural/psychological economics to investigate the microdynamics of the competition of ideas in the public sphere, which has been studied at a macroscopic level by Isabel Almudi, Francisco Fatas-Villafranca and Jason Potts. The theory we develop gives us a new vision of institutional evolution as emerging from the microdynamics of the evolution and competition of ideas in the public sphere, and a new foundation for institutional theory. It gives us a new vision of the microdynamics of institutional evolution, the evolutionary fitness of ideas for competition in the public sphere and the likely path of institutional evolution.

We provide a survey of blockchain's potential to propel private entrepreneurial discovery of institutions that challenge state hegemony. We introduce institutional cryptoeconomics, and then we describe blockchain as a technology that increases the opportunity set of entrepreneurial action. We then survey blockchain's potential to challenge state hegemony in five socioeconomic areas. We also discuss some implications of blockchainbased economic infrastructure for public policy and regulation. These contributions suggest an increasing scope for entrepreneurial action using blockchain to challenge state hegemony. They also suggest a necessary shift in the provision of public goods and government regulatory control.

We apply institutional cryptoeconomics to the information problems in global trade, model the incentives under which blockchain-based supply chain infrastructure will be built, and make predictions about the future of supply chains. We argue blockchain will change the patterns and dynamics of how, where and what we trade by: (1) facilitating new forms of economic organisation governing supply chain coordination (such as the V-form organisation); (2) decreasing information asymmetries and shifting economic power towards the ends of supply chains (e.g. primary producers); (3) changing the dimensions along which we can reliably differentiate goods and therefore de-commoditising goods and disaggregating price signals; and (4) decreasing consumer reliance on quality proxies (e.g. production within national borders).

In this paper I develop a simple, and general model of supply and demand within which almost any theory of consumer and producer behaviour may be integrated by varying parameters. I then investigate the dynamics of this model and its implications for the theory of market evolution, and show that it unifies a number of insights from evolutionary economics. I extend upon these evolutionary theories and also characterise the distribution of prices across the market and investigate its evolution over time.