In Stateless Commerce, Barak Richman uses the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the Forty-Seventh Street diamond district in midtown Manhattan--surrounded by skyscrapers and sophisticated...

In Stateless Commerce, Barak Richman uses the colorful case study of the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the 47th Street diamond district in midtown Manhattan—surrounded by skyscrapers and...

This Essay formulates a positive model that predicts when commercial parties will employ private ordering to enforce their agreements. The typical enforcement mechanism associated with private ordering is the reputation mechanism, in which a merchant community punishes parties in breach of...

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the empirical literature in transaction cost economics (TCE) across multiple social science disciplines and business fields. We show how TCE has branched out from its economic roots to examine empirical phenomena in several other areas. We find TCE...

As great admirers of The Boss and as fans of live entertainment, we share in the popular dismay over rising ticket prices for live performances. But we have been asked as antitrust scholars to examine the proposed merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and we do so with the objectivity and...

This paper develops a transaction cost economic model for regulation and applies the model to environmental siting regulations designed to overcome NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) political opposition. Negotiations between developers and resistant local communities to site waste facilities, such as...

For nearly one millennium, the diamond industry's distribution system remained largely unchanged. Ethnic networks, predominated by Jewish merchants, managed the downstream distribution system. Since state courts are unable to reliably enforce executory contracts for diamond sales, these networks...