The constituting premises of the Credibility Thesis are as follows:
- “Institutions are the resultant of endogenous, unintentional development. Although actors have intentions there is no agency that can externally design institutions, as all actors’ actions are part of the same autonomous, spontaneously ordered game.”
- “Institutional change is driven by disequilibrium. Contrary to the notion that institutions settle around equilibrium, actors’ interactions are seen as an ever-changing and conflicting process in which stable status is never reached. One could see it as a ‘Dynamic Disequilibrium’ or institutional change as perpetual alteration, yet with alternating speeds of change: sometimes imperceptibly slow, sometimes sudden and with shocks.”
- “Institutional form is subordinate to function. In other words, the use and disuse of institutions over time and space is what matters for understanding their role in development, not their appearance.”
See P. Ho, “An Endogenous Theory of Property Rights”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016, 43/6, pp. 1124-25.