The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework was designed by Ostrom and her colleagues from the Ostrom Workshop in 2005 to facilitate analysis of institution processes through which individual and collective choices occur.
The IAD framework includes analyzing actors, norms, institutional settings, incentive structures, rules, and more. Social scientists have widely adopted the IAD framework to study institutional arrangements and the emerge and changes of institutions over time.
IAD framework divides situations into "action arena", which include "participants" and "action situations". "Participants" are influenced by "Exogenous Variables", making choices within existing "rules", and engaging in “interactions”. Both the Exogenous Variables and “participants” interactions result in outcomes, which are evaluated by the “participants”. Such evaluation influences other components in the framework.
