Oliver E. Williamson, 2009 Nobel laureate and founder of “transaction cost economics,” has died at age 87.
As I wrote in 2009,
Oliver Williamson’s Nobel Prize, shared with Elinor Ostrom, is great news for Austrians. Williamson’s pathbreaking analysis of how alternative organizational forms — markets, hierarchies, and hybrids, as he calls them — emerge, perform, and adapt has defined the modern field of organizational economics.
Williamson is no Austrian, but he is sympathetic to Austrian themes (particularly the Hayekian understanding of tacit knowledge and market competition). His concept of asset specificity enhances and extends the Austrian theory of capital and his theory of firm boundaries has almost single-handedly displaced the benchmark model of perfect competition from important parts of industrial organization and antitrust economics.
He is also a pragmatic, careful, and practical economist who is concerned, first and foremost, with real-world economic phenomena, choosing clarity and relevance over formal mathematical elegance. For these and many other reasons, his work deserves careful study by Austrians.
