В этой статье Уильямсон использует концепцию трансакционных издержек для анализа природы вертикальной интеграции. Автор классифицирует и последовательно рассматривает виды провалов рынка (market failures), которые делают выгодной интернализацию производства.

James Buchanan avers that “mutuality of advantage from voluntary exchange is…the most fundamental of all understandings in economics ” (2001, p. 29). He further contends that this fundamental understanding is better realized by examining economics through the lens of contract rather than the lens of choice (1975). Because the latter has been the reigning paradigm in economics during the 20th century (Robbins, 1932; Reder, 1999), the lens of contract is (understandably) less fully developed. Interest in contractual approaches has nevertheless been building up, whence the gap between these two has been closing. This paper sketches some of these developments, with emphasis on private ordering. I begin with a brief discussion of the lenses of choice and contract. I then argue that the contractual approach is responsive to a growing sense of unease with orthodoxy. The rudiments of the private ordering approach to comparative economic organization, with emphasis on ex post governance, are then set out. Fully formal theories of contract are briefly discussed. Concluding remarks follow.

The proliferation of economics courses offered partly or completely online (Arnold Katz and William E. Becker, 1999) raises important questions about the effects of the new technologies on student learning. Do students enrolled in online courses learn more or less than students taught face-to-face? Can we identify any student characteristics, such as gender, race, ACT scores, or grade averages, that are associated with better outcomes in one technology or another? How would the online (or face-to-face) students fare if they had taken the course using the alternative technology? This paper addresses these questions using student data from our Principles of Microeconomics courses at Michigan State University.

The research for which George Akerlof, Mike Spence, and I are being recognized is part of a larger research program which, today, embraces hundred, perhaps thousands, of researchers around the worl...

In the main, empirical research is regarded as subordinate to theory. Theorists perform the difficult and innovative work of conceiving new and sometimes ingenious explanations for the world around us, leaving empiricists the relatively mundane task of gathering data and applying tools (supplied by theoretical econometricians) to support or reject hypotheses that emanate from the theory. To be sure, facts by themselves are worthless, “a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire,” as Ronald H. Coase (1984 p. 230), in characteristic form, dismissed the contribution of the oldschool institutionalists. But without diminishing in any way the creativity inherent in good theoretical work, it is worth remembering that theory without evidence is, in the end, just speculation. Two questions that theory alone can never answer are: First, which of the logically possible explanations for observed phenomena is the most probable? And second, are the phenomena that constitute the object of our speculations important? Modern empirical research on the firm, which dates to Kirk Monteverde and David J. Teece’s articles examining automotive procurement (1982a, b), is now substantial. Rather than try to summarize or discuss particular results of that literature, for which there are already several excellent surveys (the most recent of which is that of Christopher Boerner and Jeffrey Macher [2001]), my aim in the following is to comment more generally on the overall state of knowledge, particularly, the lessons that can be gleaned from the empirical literature about the relative usefulness of transaction-cost and agency theories of the firm and about the value of continued research on economic organization.

This paper treats racial integration as an innovation in economic process in which economic entities find it advantageous to utilize potentially more productive inputs previously unavailable due to law, custom, or managerial discretion. Data on the racial integration of Major League Baseball and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball are employed to address this issue. The central question examined is which type of team integrated first—losers or winners? The results strongly support the idea that entrepreneurship trumps competitive rivalry; that is, winning teams led the process of racial integration.