Oliver E. Williamson
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Oliver Eaton Williamson (born September 27, 1932) is a prominent author in the area of transaction cost economics, a student of Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon. Prof. Williamson received his Bachelor of Science in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1955, M.B.A. from Stanford University in 1960, and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1963. He has held professorships in business administration, economics, and law at the University of California, Berkeley since 1988 and is currently the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business. [1]
His focus on the costs of transactions have led Williamson to distinguish between repeated case-by-case bargaining on the one hand and relationship-specific contracts on the other. For example, the repeated purchasing of coal from a spot market to meet the daily or weekly needs of an electric utility would represent case by case bargaining. But over time, the utility is likely to form ongoing relationships with a specific supplier, and the economics of the relationship-specific dealings will be importantly different, he has argued.
Other economists have tested Williamson's transaction-cost theories in empirical contexts. One important example is a paper by Paul L. Joskow, "Contract Duration and Relationship-Specific Investments: Empirical Evidence from Coal Markets," in American Economic Review, March 1987.
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[edit] Awards, fellowships
- Horst Claus Rechtenwald Prize in Economics, 2004.
- Fellow, American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1997.
- Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1994.
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1983.
- Fellow, Econometric Society, 1977.
- Alexander Henderson Award, 1962.
[edit] Books
- The Mechanisms of Governance ISBN 0-19-513260-2
- The Economic Institutions of Capitalism ISBN 0-02-934821-8
- The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development ISBN 0-19-508356-3
- Markets and hierarchies : analysis and antitrust implications : a study in the economics of internal organization ISBN 0-02-935360-2
