John Rogers Commons (1862 - 1945) was a well-known institutional economist, and born in Hollansburg, Ohio.

Commons is best known for developing an analysis of collective action by the state and other institutions, which he saw as essential to understanding economic dynamics. In this analysis he continued the strong American tradition in institutional economics by such figures as the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen. This institutional theory was closely related to his remarkable successes in fact-finding and drafting legislation on a wide range of social issues for the State of Wisconsin. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and he drafted legislation establishing Wisconsin's worker's compensation program, which became the first such program in the United States. Several of his colleagues (such as Arthur J. Altmeyer went on to create the social security program in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Commons also undertook a major study of the history of American labor. His practical work has been remembered just as much as his theory of institutional economics.

Quotes

• "...An institution is collective action in control, liberation and expansion of individual action."
• "...But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged..."

--"Institutional Economics" American Economic Review, vol. 21 (1931), pp.648-657.