Conference invitation

The Second Annual Conference on Institutional Foundations for Industry Self-Regulation took place on February 16-17 at the Harvard Business School. The conference program, registration form and additional information can be found on this website.

The conference convened 70 practitioners and scholars researching institutional mechanisms for solving industry-wide problems in a wide array of domains. Examples include open source communities, professional codes of conduct, ratings organizations, standard setting bodies, and a variety of private-sector alternatives to government regulation. This year's conference highlighted research on institutions for multi-lateral collaboration, such as open source communities or knowledge sharing organizations.

The conference addressed questions such as:

• How are self-regulatory institutions organized?
• How can we measure the impact or performance of self-regulatory institutions?
• When is self-regulation a complement or substitute for corporate or governmental control?
• What features of the business environment promote or discourage self-regulation?
• What are the design-principles for these institutional mechanisms?

The conference program included sessions on the following topics:

• Designing and Making the Rules
• Industry Self-policing to Enforce the Rules
• Networks and Self-Regulation
• Collaborating for Innovation: Community-Based Approaches
• Perspectives on Adoption and Impact
• Theory Workbench

The conference was organized by:

38 papers were submitted in response to the call for papers. The conference included 19 presentions and a poster session that featured 8 additional papers.

List of participants, sorted by Last Name and by University/Organization.

The ISR Conference Series

• In 2006, the First Annual Conference on Institutional Mechanisms of Industry Self-Regulation was held at the Tuck School at Dartmouth
• In 2008, the Third Annual Conference on Institutions for Industry Self-Regulation will take place February 29 - March 1, 2008 at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University