Introduction

The complexity of social realities like globalization, specialization and digitalization has made governance a scarce resource. For the data protection example, the current economics of governance recommends reading the fine print to make best use of control via the contract. The challenge for economics of governance is to incorporate intrinsic motivation as a factor to derive a trade-off between more governance devices and thus decrease normativity and increase explanatory power. Historically, economics has focused on extrinsic motivation/control, which inter alia leads to a fruitful research program at the interface of “law and economics”. As a general insight it can be seen how intrinsic motivation may be less costly and more effective but harder to signal, and how extrinsic motivation may be more costly and more imperfect, but easier to signal and to establish ad hoc. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.