In modern economies a substantial proportion of resources is increasingly allocated to transaction costs. An improvement in the definition of transaction costs to include both the information role and efficiency role requires an integration of the approaches of positive economics and normative economics. In The Economics of Transaction Costs P.K.Rao provides a comprehensive analytical treatment of the subject and suggests a few directions for formal economic models.
Transaction cost economics began to take shape around 1970 and has since been established as an essential tool used to illuminate a wide range of problems in economics and other social sciences. This reader presents articles which together form the foundations of research in transaction cost economics.
In recent years transaction cost economics have come to dominate the discussion of the nature and organization of firms. In Transaction Costs Economics and Beyond Michael Dietrich offers a critical exploration of transaction costs. He argues that whilst they have much to offer, they are still an inadequate basis for a general theory of the firm. Drawing on theories of organizational behaviour as well as economics, he concludes by offering a theory of the firm that allows for both hierarchical and creative decision making.
In recent years transaction cost economics have come to dominate the discussion of the nature and organization of firms. In Transaction Costs Economics and Beyond Michael Dietrich offers a critical exploration of transaction costs. He argues that whilst they have much to offer, they are still an inadequate basis for a general theory of the firm. Drawing on theories of organizational behaviour as well as economics, he concludes by offering a theory of the firm that allows for both hierarchical and creative decision making.
Transaction cost economics has and continues to be a fruitful area of research. There is still much to be done in the field with past research being used in conjunction with the vast number of contractual phenomena that have yet to be investigated in transaction cost economics terms. New challenges are posed by the need to move beyond the design of new contractual instruments (such as financial derivatives) to include an examination of the lurking hazards that attend contract implementation.
This text deals with some of the most fundamental issues of transaction cost economics. It focuses on the analysis of the internal nature and characteristics of organizations and of the subtle interactions between institutional environment and governance structures over time.
The Making of Economic Policy begins by observing that most countries' trade policies are so blatantly contrary to all the prescriptions of the economist that there is no way to understand this discrepancy except by delving into the politics. The same is true for many other dimensions of economic policy. Avinash Dixit looks for an improved understanding of the politics of economic policy-making from a transaction cost perspective. Such costs of planning, implementing, and monitoring an exchange have proved critical to explaining many phenomena in industrial organization. Dixit discusses the variety of similar transaction costs encountered in the political process of making economic policy and how these costs affect the operation of different institutions and policies. Dixit organizes a burgeoning body of research in political economy in this framework. He uses U.S. fiscal policy and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as two examples that illustrate the framework, and show how policy often deviates from the economist's ideal of efficiency. The approach reveals, however, that some seemingly inefficient practices are quite creditable attempts to cope with transaction costs such as opportunism and asymmetric information. Copublished with the Center for Economic Studies and the Ifo Institute
