اقتصاد هزینه معاملات: پیشرفت طبیعی

This manuscript provides the Nobel laureate's reflections on transaction cost economics. The overview section frames governance as the overarching concept and transaction cost economics as the means by which to breathe operational content into governance and organization. The vertical integration section identifies efficiency factors associated with determining when a firm produces a good or service to its own needs rather than outsource. A discussion of the rudiments of transaction cost analysis is subsequently provided. Puzzles and challenges that require pushing the logic of efficient governance to completion are examined and followed by concluding remarks.

The research program on which I and others have been working has been variously described as the “economics of governance,” the “economics of organization,” and “transaction cost economics.” As discussed in section “An overview”, governance is the overarching concept and transaction cost economics is the means by which to breathe operational content into governance and organization. The specific issue that drew me into this research project was the puzzle posed by Ronald Coase in 1937: What efficiency factors determine when a firm produces a good or service to its own needs rather than outsource? As described in section “The Vertical Integration of Production”, my 1971 paper on “The Vertical Integration of Production” made headway with this issue and invited follow-on research that would eventually come to be referred to as transaction cost economics. The rudiments of transaction cost economics are set out in section “The rudiments”. Puzzles and challenges that arose and would require “pushing the logic of efficient governance to completion” are examined briefly in section “Pushing the logic to completion”. Concluding remarks follow.

What I describe as the transaction cost economics project had its origins in the puzzle posed by Coase in 1937: What explains the boundaries of the firm? I addressed this by tak- ing the vertical integration decision to be the focal transaction and, upon reformulating it as a contracting problem, asked the following question: When and why should a firm acquire a tech- nologically separable component by outsourcing rather than producing to its own needs – where outsourcing entails con- tracting out and own-production to contracting within. This question was addressed as an efficiency issue by selectively combining economics with organization theory. Albeit intended as a stand-alone research project, the vertical integration setup would open windows to a wide array of economic activities that arose as or could be reformulated in comparative contractual terms. With the benefit of hindsight, transaction cost economics has undergone a natural progression. The informal stage got started in the 1930s with Coase’s challenge to the profession that firm and market organization should be derived rather than (as was then the practice) taken as given, to include the suggestion that the missing concept was transaction cost. This latter was but- tressed by demonstrations (by Arrow and Coase) in the 1960s that much of standard economics was reduced to irrelevance upon pushing the logic of zero transaction costs to comple- tion. The pre-formal stage began in the 1970s with the applica- tion of the lens of contract/governance to vertical integration. Interfirm contracts that were incomplete (by reason of bounds on rationality) would experience maladaptation hazards if the parties were bilaterally dependent (by reason of transaction spe- cific investments) in the face of disturbances for which the stakes are great (strategic defection). This economics of gov-ernance approach would subsequently have wide application as other contractual phenomena were interpreted as variations on a theme. The semi-formal stage gave added prominence to the defining attributes of alternative modes of governance (market, hybrid, and hierarchy) as these relate to differing adaptive needs, of autonomous and coordinated kinds, among different transac- tions. A series of puzzles arose as this operationalization effort progressed – of which the efficacy of selective intervention was one and scaling up was another, for which the answers would be revealed by pushing the logic of economic organizations to com- pletion. Beginning in the early 1980s and growing exponentially thereafter, an ambitious effort at empirical testing got underway. Applications to public policy are likewise numerous and grow- ing. Fully formal research of a transaction cost economics kind has taken shape and more is in progress. I conclude that selectively combining law, economics, and organization to study the governance of contractual relations from a transaction cost economizing perspective has been instructive; and I project that research of this kind will continue to develop in conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and public pol- icy respects. Research in transaction cost economics faces an interesting, challenging future.