With airport privatization and infrastructure expansion projects taking place in the liberalized European air transport market, airport and airline companies are critically reevaluating their vertical governance structures. This paper analyzes the comparative efficiency of vertical governance...

This paper discusses the possible legitimating function (understood as the ability to provide an appropriate framework for the development of rational arguments supporting legal principles and rules) of the Coasian "narrative". I argue that the Coasian narrative is inadequate to provide rational...

This paper explores the feasibility to extend the Standard Cost Model (SCM) for calculating the costs of government regulation by taking all transaction costs into account which stem from the principal/agent relationship between regulatory authorities and economic entities. From that perspective...

The role of individual inventors, small firms and entrepreneurs in the patent courts has become controversial for two, somewhat contradictory reasons. First, there is the view that small parties may be at a serious disadvantage in the courts since they do not have the financial resources to...

This piece offers a fresh perspective on the upper-level employment law class based on the theme of employment as transaction. Like much of law school, employment law is often taught from a public advocacy perspective in which the primary role of the lawyer is to vindicate workers' rights or...

A major achievement of new institutionalism in economics and political science is the formalisation of the idea that certain policies are more efficient when administered by a politically independent organisation. Based on this insight, several policy actors and scholars criticise the European...

We consider three explanations for public ownership: public interest, regulation, and a transaction cost interpretation. We employ a large dataset containing information on the municipal acquisition of U.S. private water companies between 1897 and 1915. Those data allow us to isolate the effects...

Public policies are the outcomes of complex intertemporal exchanges among politicians. The political institutions of a country constitute the framework within which these transactions are accomplished. We develop a transactions theory to understand the ways in which political institutions affect...

In this study, we examine the strategies adopted by partners in multipartner alliances. Drawing from the literature, we argue that the inherent tensions in strategic alliances are accentuated in multipartner alliances, resulting in higher expected transaction costs. We hypothesize that, to deal...

This article critically examines the goal of minimizing transaction costs, including the costs of legal decision-making. This goal permeates the law and economics literature and has profoundly influenced public policy. While most transaction cost scholarship has focused upon private law, this...