The purpose of this article is to appraise the analytical usefulness of the new institutionalist approach by investigating the explanatory capacity of the transaction cost concept. After a discussion of the problems of defining the concept of transaction costs through the identification of three...

This article challenges some fundamental propositions of property rights theory by revealing the inability of new institutional economics to fully grasp the notion of property, as reflected in its narrow and problematic definition of property rights. The concept of property relations is proposed...