In this workshop I plan to discuss recent work (by myself and others) that looks at the comparative governance of activities to deal with social problems. Building off classic work in institutional and organizational economics , this research asks: what is the comparatively efficient governance arrangement for addressing social issues? One sub-stream of this work examines the conditions under which for-profit firms may have an advantage in solving social problems. A second sub-stream focuses on alternate organizational forms--non-profits, cooperatives, B-corps, etc--and tries to understand the comparative advantage of these forms relative to for-profit firms and / or government bureaucracies in advancing social welfare. I plan to summarize and discuss recent advances (both theoretical and empirical) in this area.