Metaphors are part of our daily lives as they help us understand the world. Economics, as other areas of knowledge, cannot go without metaphors. Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) – a prominent theoretical framework on economic organisation – is no different: it has been built on a set of...

Chapter 12 of Keynes' General Theory has concepts and analytical links with strong identification with the ones used by the so-called institutional approaches. This essay highlights what seems to have been anticipated by Keynes on the research core of institutional economics, mainly based on his...

Bounded rationality, opportunism, the primacy of markets and the action of economizing are building blocks of Oliver Williamson's Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). As in all intellectual exchanges, Williamson has used a range of argumentative devices to set up and negotiate his basic notions and...

As Transaction Cost Economics evolved and entwined with the name of Oliver Williamson, it has absorbed a tension 'between an intuitive commitment to realism...and his commitment to some core presumptions of mainstream economics' [Hodgson 1998]. Most TCE scholars seem to rely on the latter...