This paper simulates Ronald Coase’s transaction cost approach to firm organizing using agent-based modeling, and contextualizes and contrasts it with the earlier division-of-labor/specialization theory of the firm that Coase challenged and sought to replace. The simulation tests firm emergence...

This paper outlines a resource-based theory of the firm focusing on the physical reality of production, resources, and innovation. This approach differs from previous attempts to extend the resource-based view to explain the firm by identifying the drivers behind resource heterogenization, their...

It has become commonplace in management research to refer to “transaction cost theory,” a joint Coase-Williamson approach to economic organizing. This off-the-cuff usage overlooks their differences by treating Coase as a pre-Williamsonian. I argue that their theoretical frameworks are...

We study the economic rationale for integrating production fully separated from the “legal fiction” of the firm. In order to do this, we develop a “thick” model of the market as an economic organism, a more realistic pure market regime than general equilibrium models, which consists of...

Kirzner (2019) develops an Austrian perspective to critique Friedman’s universal ethic for profit, specifically for not including a rationale for entrepreneurial discovery of pure profit. In this article, I assess Kirzner’s argument, drawing from the theory originally developed by Carl...

The study of entrepreneurship and the study of economic organizing lack contact. In fact, the modern theory of the firm virtually ignores entrepreneurship, while the literature on entrepreneurship often sees little value in the economic theory of the firm. In contrast, we argue in this chapter...

This paper reviews Austrian approaches to the firm and drafts a theory that emphasizes the firm as a market phenomenon. Here the firm is a vehicle for imaginative entrepreneurs to create artificially high factor density, thereby increasing its internal “extent of the market” to support...