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Mohd Amar Aziz · Badariah Haji Din · Kamaruddin Abdulsomad ·Institutions and Economies ·2019 ·JEL: I3; O3; P4; Z1

This paper examines transaction costs inthe institutional zakat system from the open innovation perspective and tries to understand its impact on performance. It attempts to harmonise the concept of transaction costs with the open innovation strategy, especially in the aspect of zakat distribution. A quantitative approach was applied in measuring the performance of zakat distribution, where the data were based on the perspectives of zakat payers in Malaysia. Transaction costs were treated as the mediator, while the property right of zakat was the independent factor towards the performance of zakat. The result showed two critical aspects of the transaction costs, namely the asset specificity and the service measurability, performed positively as mediators in determining the performance of zakat distribution. Institutional arrangements through open innovation strategy are suggested to reduce the transaction costs in delivering the benefits of zakat to the righteous recipients. It can be executed practically by focusing on the asset specificity and service measurability through the open innovation strategy. By reducing transaction costs, the public will be able to understand that the zakat institution developed not only to provide charity to the poor and needy, but its capacity stretches beyond the physical values by nurturing the giving spirituality with love and enhances the values of the transaction.

Gabriel Hoh Teck Ling · Pau Chung Leng and Chin Siong Ho ·Economies ·2019 ·JEL: D01; D02; D23; D62; K11; O21; P25; Q24; Q26

There are severe issues of public open space (POS) underinvestment and overexploitation. However, few studies have been conducted on the property rights structure and its impacts on rural commons governance, specifically concerning local neighbourhood residential POS quality and sustainability. The social-ecological system framework and the new institutional economics theory were employed to examine the local diverse property rights system and its e_x000B_ects on the emergence of POS dilemmas. Rural commons covering neighbourhood residential Country Lease (CL) and Native Title (NT) POS from the districts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah Malaysia were selected. A mixed-method phenomenological case study, involving multi-stakeholders’ perspectives across public-private-user sectors, was employed. This study revealed four main interconnected property rights issues, including attenuated rights, incomplete rights, maladaptive rights, and security-based de facto perceptive rights, under the complex state-private regime, which incentivise the opportunistic behaviour of individuals in externalising POS commons dilemmas. The findings further inferred that the local diverse property rights issues and POS dilemmas caused, and are associated with, other rights issues and dilemmas, forming a rights-dilemmas nexus. Not only do the institutional failures actuate POS dilemmas, but the former also engender other forms of property rights failures, while the latter cause other POS dilemmas. This paper suggests policy and management insights to public o_x000E_cials, in which the importance of the institutional-social-POS behavioural factor and the re-engineering of POS governance via adaptive property rights realignment are emphasised.