This overview of transaction cost economics is organized around the "Carnegie Tripleʺ be disciplined; be interdisciplinary; have an active mind. The first of these urges those who would open up the black box of economic organization to do so in a modest, slow, molecular, definitive way, with the...

Theories of path dependence and incumbent inertia assume that self-reinforcing mechanisms lead to highly persistent and eventually inefficient institutional solutions. The resulting lock-in is likely to threaten the viability of an organization. While path dependence theory was initially...

This discussion paper reports and reflects on the reception of our article "Organizational path dependence: Opening the black box", which was published in 2009 in the Academy of Management Review and granted the AMR Decade Award in 2019. While we were invited by the editor of the journal to...