IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-540-69305-5_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Transaction Cost Economics

In: Handbook of New Institutional Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Oliver E. Williamson

    (University of California)

Abstract

Transaction cost economics is an effort to better understand complex economic organization by selectively joining law, economics, and organization theory. As against neoclassical economics, which is predominantly concerned with price and output, relies extensively on marginal analysis, and describes the firm as a production function (which is a technological construction), transaction cost economics (TCE) is concerned with the allocation of economic activity across alternative modes of organization (markets, firms, bureaus, etc.), employs discrete structural analysis, and describes the firm as a governance structure (which is an organizational construction). Real differences notwithstanding, orthodoxy and TCE are in many ways complements—one being more wellsuited to aggregation in the context of simple market exchange, the other being more well-suited to the microanalytics of complex contracting and nonmarket organization. I begin by contrasting the lens of contract (out of which TCE works) with the lens of choice (orthodoxy). Vertical integration, which is the paradigm problem for TCE, is then examined. The operationalization of TCE is discussed in Section 3. Variations on a theme are sketched in Section 4. Public policy is discussed in Section 5. Concluding remarks follow.

Suggested Citation

  • Oliver E. Williamson, 2008. "Transaction Cost Economics," Springer Books, in: Claude Ménard & Mary M. Shirley (ed.), Handbook of New Institutional Economics, chapter 3, pages 41-65, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-69305-5_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-69305-5_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Vertical Integration; Price Discovery; Petroleum Coke; Spot Market; Transaction Cost Economic;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L0 - Industrial Organization - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-69305-5_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.