Oliver E. Williamson

Economist

1932-09-27

Quotes by Oliver E. Williamson

• Ronald Coase, in his classic 1937 paper on 'The Nature of the Firm,' was the first to bring the concept of transaction costs to bear on the study of firm and market organization.

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• The transaction cost approach maintains that some projects are easy to finance by debt and ought to be financed by debt. These are projects for which physical-asset specificity is low to moderate.

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• The hypothesis that economic organization is the resultant of a series of historic accidents is intructive in that many organizational innovations appear to be the result of trial and error.

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• Managerial discretion can take many forms, some very subtle. Individual managers may run slack operations; they may pursue subgoals that are at variance with corporate purposes; they can engage in self-dealing.

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• Vertical intergration is an organizational response to the contracting difficulties that attend intermediate product markets where trades that are supported by transaction-specific assets are exposed to hazard.

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• The remediableness criterion is an effort to deal symmetrically with real world institutions, both public and private, warts and all. The criterion is this: an extant mode of organization for which no superior feasible form of organization can be described and implemented with expected net gains is presumed to be efficient.

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