Abstract-Blockchain technology has emerged as a solution to consistency problems in peer to peer networks. By now, it has matured as a solution to a range of use cases in which it can effectively provide the notion of third party trust without the need for a trusted (physical) third party, which makes it an attractive coordination mechanism for distributed systems. To promote the wide adoption of this technology, we yet lack mechanisms that make the specification and interpretation of smart contracts accessible to a broader audience. In this work, we propose a modeling approach that supports the semi-automated translation of human-readable contract representations into computational equivalents in order to enable the codification of laws into verifiable and enforceable computational structures that reside within a public blockchain. We identify smart contract components that correspond to real world institutions, and propose a mapping that we operationalize using a domain-specific language in order to support the contract modeling process. We explore this capability based on selected examples and plot out directions for future research on smart contracts.
Public affairs scholars have contributed rich insights on the role and outcomes of institutions in policy and administrative settings. They have offered numerous empirical studies of these topics, alongside concepts and theories that can be leveraged in their assessment. But there remains a relative dearth in attention to approaches that can be used to support rigorous assessments of institutional design itself—those that support reliable and nuanced representations of institutional structure and meaning. The Institutional Grammar (IG) is one such approach that has gained in prominence over the last decade. Existing applications validate the IG's utility toward rigorous assessments of institutional design, and highlight the IG's value in operationalizing concepts relevant in policy and administration scholarship. We build on existing IG research by presenting a revised specification IG 2.0 for encoding and analyzing institutional design that responds to representational necessities and analytical opportunities within and beyond policy and administrative domains.
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