The most obvious things that come up are “business model” institutions–who gets paid for what on what basis. Often there is a traditional basis for transactions that is no longer incentive compatible with maximizing joint surplus when technology or demand conditions shift. Yet people resist change, often because they fear that they cannot separate the distributional impact from the efficiency impact.

A good example is TV producers fighting (and winning for a long time) against relaxing the FCC’s financial/syndication rules that limited networks’ ability to own TV shows. The incentives of the traditional system were truly screwy, with the networks’ cancellation decisions hugely affecting the wealth of the producers (by determining whether they accumulated enough episodes to sell reruns in the syndication market), but the networks not seeing a dime of the syndication money. Hardly a recipe for efficient cancellation decisions, but the producers and studios were militant about retaining this structure (even getting former actor Ronald Reagan to overrule his own policy people to preserve the regs).