At the intersection of anthropology, ecomomics, law, political science, public administration, and sociology, a sufficient body of literature had accumulated from interdisciplinary research efforts by the mid-1960s to offer a new approach to the study of public decision making. Those inquiries were stimulated by a growing awareness that problems of institutional weaknesses and failures in market arrangements could not be corrected simply by recourse to governmental decision processes which were themselves subject to serious limits. How did we develop a better understanding of structure and performance in the “public sector”? What were the limits applicable to collective choice and its relationship to collective action? Now, in the presence of three of four decades of cumulative efforts, how does one assess the prospects over the next generation?