Most of the standard economic analyses of the firm utilize only the capital (including the human one) and labor factors, and a term called technology to embrace all the remaining elements. The introduction of the transaction costs (TCs) by Coase (1937) has generated a new stream of complementary theory of the firm as developed mainly by Williamson (1985 etc). Then, a crit ique on TCs has lead to the recognition of other factors such as internal capabilities, information and know-how, routines, strategies, and so on. However, it seems that there is still a gap in economic theory or management theory as to the exact nature of all types of costs (besides transaction and production costs) involved in the creation, existence, and evolution of firms. According to my findings, all the activities and practices of firms can be split into 5 interdependent groups of processes of operations, namely those of movement, of factors, of contracts, of wisdom, and of strategies. In turn, each one of these processes is related to kinetic, physical, transaction, wisdom, and strategic costs respectively. Then, for each group I assign several essential characteristics that fully describe it. The implications of this paper are also briefly discussed.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia in its series Economics Working Papers with number
wp01-12.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? Each page is provided with a technical contact, in case something is not right with the supplied information. See under "publisher info".