اقتصاد هزینه معاملات: ریشه ها

This paper is an autobiographical recollection of how my interest in and work on transaction cost economics progressively developed. It begins with an overview of the transaction cost economics project. A sketch of my undergraduate and graduate education follows. Key events in the 1960s that set the stage for my 1971 paper on “The Vertical Integration of Production” are then described. This paper would turn out to be the entering wedge from which transaction cost economics would take shape and continues today, as set out in the closing pages of the article.

This paper owes its origins to a request that I received from Arne Nygaard, asking me to write an introductory note for this special issue of JR. Rather than leave it at that, however, Arne went on to suggest that I “reveal the story behind the success story of TCE ... . I would like to know if there is a Newton story of falling apples (actual time and place) ... . I would like to know more about ... Carnegie Mellon and the group of people there and the other universities where you worked.” 1 The answer to the first of these is that there was no falling apple, but I did benefit from a series of insights that, individually and collectively, served to unlock the gates to transaction cost economics. I begin by sketching the key moves that led into the transaction cost economics project. I then provide the details and people who participated in various stages of development.

My position is that transaction cost economics is one of the informative lenses with which to study complex economic orga- nization. The 35 years from Markets and Hierarchies (1975) to 2010 reveal that transaction cost economics has not only had wide reach but is an empirical success story: empirical tests of the predictions of transaction cost economics numbered over 800 as of 2006 and have been broadly corroborative ( Macher and Richman 2008 ). Indeed, “despite what almost 30 years ago may have appeared to be insurmountable obstacles to acquiring the relevant data [which are often primary data of a microanalytic kind], today transaction cost economics stands on a remarkably broad empirical foundation” ( Geyskens, Steenkamp, and Kumar 2006, p. 531 ). There is no gainsaying that transaction cost eco- nomics has been much more influential because of the empirical work that it has engendered ( Whinston 2001 ). This project is not, moreover, completed. Transaction cost economics faces a challenging future in conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and public policy respects as the baton is passed to a new generation.