Interview with the 2009 Laureates in Economic Sciences Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson, 6 December 2009. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

I address the topic of pragmatic methodology as a practitioner in applied microeconomics who has been working in the still nascent field of the 'economics of organization'. My purpose is both to make explicit the methodology out of which transaction cost economics works and to suggest that other...

Transaction cost economics began to take shape around thirty years ago and has since been established as an essential tool used to illuminate a wide range of problems in economics and other social sciences. This paperback reader for students and scholars presents, in a convenient and accessible...

Oliver Williamson is one of the most important industrial economists of our time. He has made a major contribution to economic scholarship and remains at the forefront of research into transaction costs and the theory of the firm. In this volume he has provided a very careful selection of what...

Transaction cost economics has and continues to be a fruitful area of research. There is still much to be done in the field with past research being used in conjunction with the vast number of contractual phenomena that have yet to be investigated in transaction cost economics terms. New...

"Theories commonly progress through four stages, from informal to pre-formal to semi-formal and fully formal. This paper reports on the earliest stage of transaction cost economics that extended from the 1920s to the 1970s. That the gestation stage lasted so long is partly because transaction...