This paper's title is an echo of Alfred Chandler's (2001) chronicle of the electronics industry, Inventing the Electronic Century. The paper attempts (A) a general reinterpretation of the pattern of technological advance in (American) electronics over the twentieth century and (B) a somewhat...

Most markets have evolved as buyers and sellers constantly search for ways to create value, however this has not occurred naturally in all areas of the economy – markets are missing for some goods, including the environment. In such cases, transaction costs linked to property rights, asymmetric...

This paper presents an analysis of agricultural contracts using a transaction costs approach. We contend that in a context of modern agriculture, with well defined property rights, agricultural contracts must balance costs and benefits, aligning tenant and landlord incentives towards a similar...

"We are concerned here with the creation of non-market institutions for reducing the cost of risk in poor agrarian societies that operate at low levels of technology without the benefits of insurance, credit and other intertemporal markets. 1 Institutions, the formal and informal rules that...

"One of the missing links in common property research has been the interaction between common property resource users and the market. The present research fills that gap with a study of Mexico's agrarian communities which coordinate timber production within their commonly-owned forest land. The...

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work....

Through this present piece of work we aim at analysing the integrated system of chickenproduction in Minas Gerais, in accordance to the Economy in Transaction Costs, seeking especifically todescribing the transaction features, administration forms as well as contractual relations. Transactions...

Following sound economic theory, paper mills vertically integrate into pulp production, partly because internalizing the production of their inputs allows them to avoid transaction costs. Higher market concentration, a proxy of higher asset specificity and transaction costs, should encourage...

Which form of exchange governance performs better in a dynamic environment? This remains an unanswered question in the transaction cost analysis (TCA) and relational exchange literatures. Some researchers purport that transactional governance provides superior performance by providing firms the...

This dissertation investigates the driving forces behind the emerging phenomenon of "organizational modularity", by which firms create "virtual" organizations through outsourcing functions, by using contract manufacturers, by forming alliances, and by using temporary employment contracts, as...