The paper begins by providing a brief overview and discussion of the modern economics of organization, concentrating in particular on the work of incomplete contract theorists. I then turn to a discussion of Loasby’s view of the firm and incomplete contracts. The point here is that while...

The paper aims at ‘embedding’ the outsourcing firm by considering it as a four-fold unit of analysis: i.e. as an organizational, production, industrial and innovation unit. Theoretical correlations between outsourcing decisions and outsourcing variables are formulated and then tested with...

The paper aims at investigating how far transaction costs economics (TCE) concurs in the explanation of outsourcing decisions in firms characterized by “thick’ industrial relations, that is where unions and employees are involved in, and are sometimes able to affect, the relative managerial...

Ever since its emergence in the 1970s the modern economic or Coasian theory of the firm has been discussed and challenged by sociologists, heterodox economists, management scholars, and other critics. This chapter reviews and assesses these critiques, focusing on behavioral issues (bounded...

We argue that since Coase’s seminal 1937 paper on “The Nature of the Firm,” there has been an odd and unjustified separation between price theory and the economics of organization. For example, matters of production has been the domain of the former exclusively. However, a new approach to...

Knowledge management has emerged as a very successful organization practice and has been extensively treated in a large body of academic work. Surprisingly, however, organizational economics (i.e., transaction cost economics, agency theory, team theory and property rights theory) has played no...

I discuss and compare alternative approaches to integrating bounded rationality with the theory of economic organization, concentrating on the organizational capabilities approach, which is strongly influenced by the works of Nelson and Winter, organizational economics, particularly transaction...

In this paper I argue that quality standards, products standards, and quality classes influence the priority that firms give to different product developments. These standards may be viewed as institutions in the sense of shared rules of behavior or codes. They have become shared because there...

The role of transaction cost economics in developing research in strategy has been a hotly debated topic over the last decade. This paper presents the radical argument that transaction cost insights are more than merely useful complements to existing approaches to strategy. Rather, they are...