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...

In his pioneering work on transaction costs, Ronald Coase presupposed a picture of property as a bundle of government-prescribed use rights. This picture is not only not essential to what Coase was trying to do, but its limitations emerge when we apply Coase’s central insights to analyze the...

Purpose The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor. Design/methodology/approach The author approaches the discussion using a...

The article develops R. H. Coase’s insight that the level of transaction costs in the market determines the amount of externalities, thus providing arguments against government intervention. Contrary to Coase, however, we argue that the level of transaction costs cannot be considered as given,...

This article is the introductory chapter to a festschrift in honour of Geoff Hodgson. In work spanning four decades, Geoff Hodgson has made many path-breaking contributions to institutional economics, evolutionary economics, economic methodology, the history of economic thought and social theory...

The aim of this arti cle is to show that the New Insti tuti onal Economics is an interdisciplinary stream combining economics, law, organizati on theory, politi cal sciences, sociology, and anthropology. The main theories which are part of the New Insti tuti onal Economics are: Agency Theory,...

Coase’s work emphasized the economic importance of very small markets and made a new, more marginalist form of economic “institutionalism” acceptable within mainstream economics. A Coasean market is an association of persons with competing claims on a legal entitlement that can be traded....

The paper examines the viability of applying transaction cost reasoning to the government by discussing the possibility of further international cooperation in the field of antitrust. Given that, in their international relations, the analogy between states and private actors is more realistic...

One of the main contributions of Ronald H. Coase was to demonstrate how mainstream economics was based on a contradictory amalgam of costly physical inputs and free institutional resources, and to gave origin the economics of institutions: each institution is a mode of allocation and...