(ODG), was formed on May 7, 1915, by the merger of Harvard University's Undergraduate Society of Economics with the University of Wisconsin's Order of Artus, an economics student society modeled on King Arthur's Knights of the Roundtable; Wisconsin's group was advised by Commons.

In 1934, Commons published Institutional Economics, which laid out his view that institutions were made up of collective actions that, along with conflict of interests, defined the economy. He believed that institutional economics added collective control of