The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
The
Institutional Structure of Production
American Economic Review,
82 (4
Sept. 1992, 713-719.
In my long life I have known some great economists, but
I have never counted myself among their number nor walked in their company.
I have made no innovations in high
theory. My contribution to
economics has been to urge the inclusion in our analysis of features of the
economic system so obvious that, like the postman in G. K. Chesterton’s Father
Brown tale, “The Invisible Man,” they have tended to be overlooked. Nonetheless, once included in the
analysis, they will, as I believe, bring about a complete change in the
structure of economic theory, at least in what is called price theory or
microeconomics. What I have done is
to show the importance for the working of the economic system of what may be
termed the institutional structure of production. In this lecture I shall explain why, in
my view, these features of the economic system were ignored and why their
recognition will lead to a change in the way we analyze the working of the
economic system and in the way we think about economic policy, changes which are
already beginning to occur. I will
also speak about the empirical work that needs to be done if this transformation
in our approach is to increase our understanding. In speaking about this transformation, I
do not wish to suggest that it is the result of my work alone. Oliver Williamson, Harold Demsetz, and
Steven Cheung, among others, have made outstanding contributions to the subject,
and without their work and that of many others, I doubt whether the significance
of my writings would have been recognized. While it
*
This article is the lecture R. H. Coase delivered in
713
has been a great advantage of the creation of the Prize
in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that, by drawing attention to the
significance of particular fields of economics, it encourages further research
in them, the highlighting of the work of a few scholars, or, in my case, one
scholar, tends to obscure the importance of the contributions of other able
scholars whose researches have been crucial to the development of the
field.
I will be speaking of that part of economics which has
come to be called industrial organization, but to understand its present state,
it is necessary to say something about the development of economics in general.
During the two centuries since the
publication of The Wealth of Nations, the main activity of economists, it
seems to me, has been to fill the gaps in Adam Smith’s system, to correct his
errors, and to make his analysis vastly more exact. A principal theme of The Wealth of
Nations was that government regulation or centralized planning were not
necessary to make an economic system function in an orderly way. The economy could be coordinated by a
system of prices (the “invisible hand”) and, furthermore, with beneficial
results. A major task of economists
since the publication of The Wealth of Nations, as Harold Demsetz (1988
p.145) has explained,
has been to formalize this proposition of Adam Smith. The given factors are technology and the
tastes of consumers, and individuals, who follow their own interest, are
governed in their choices by a system of prices. Economists have uncovered the conditions
necessary if Adam Smith’s results are to be achieved and where, in the real
world, such conditions do not appear to be found, they have proposed changes
which are designed to bring them about. It is what one finds in the textbooks.
Harold Demsetz has said rightly
that what this theory analyzes is a system of extreme decentralization. It has
714
been a great intellectual achievement, and it throws
light on many aspects of the economic system. But it has not been by any means all
gain. The concentration on the
determination of prices has led to a narrowing of focus which has had as a
result the neglect of other aspects of the economic system. Sometimes, indeed, it seems as though
economists conceive of their subject as being concerned only with the pricing
system and anything outside this is considered as no part of their business.
Thus, my old chief and wonderful
human being, Lionel Robbins, wrote, in The Nature and Significance of
Economic Science, about the “glaring deficiencies” of the old treatment of
the theory of production with its discussion of peasant proprietorships and
industrial forms: “It suggests that from the point of view of the economist
‘organisation’ is a matter of internal industrial (or agricultural) arrangement
- if not internal to the firm, at any rate internal to ‘the’ industry. At the same time it tends to leave out
completely the governing factor of all productive organization - the
relationship of prices and cost... (Robbins, 1932 p. 70). What this comes down to is that, in
Robbins’s view, an economist does not interest himself in the internal
arrangements within organizations but only in what happens on the market, the
purchase of factors of production, and the sale of the goods that these factors
produce. What happens in between
the purchase of the factors of production and the sale of the goods that are
produced by these factors is largely ignored. I do not know how far economists today
share Robbins’s attitude but it is undeniable that microeconomics is largely a
study of the determination of prices and output; indeed, this part of economics
is often called price theory.
This neglect of other aspects of the system has been
made easier by another feature of modern economic theory - the growing
abstraction of the analysis, which does not seem to call for a detailed
knowledge of the actual economic system or, at any rate, has managed to proceed
without it. Bengt Holmstrom and
Jean Tirole (1989) writing on “The Theory of the Firm” in the recently published
Handbook of Industrial Organization, conclude at the end of their article
of 63 pages that “the evidence/theory ratio… is currently very low in this
field.” Sam Peltzman (1991) has
written a scathing review of the Handbook in which he points out how much
of the discussion in it is theory without any empirical basis. What is studied is a system which lives
in the minds of economists but not on earth. I have called the result “blackboard
economics.” The firm and the market
appear by name but they lack any substance. The firm in mainstream economic theory
has often been described as a “black box.” And so it is. This is very extraordinary given that
most resources in a modern economic system are employed within firms, with how
these resources are used dependent on administrative decisions and not directly
on the operation of a market. Consequently, the efficiency of the
economic system depends to a very considerable extent on how these organizations
conduct their affairs, particularly, of course, the modern corporation. Even more surprising, given their
interest in the pricing system, is the neglect of the market or more
specifically the institutional arrangements which govern the process of
exchange. As these institutional
arrangements determine to a large
extent what is produced, what we have is a very incomplete theory.
All this is beginning to change,
and in this process I am glad to have played my part. The value of including such institutional
factors in the corpus of mainstream economics is made clear by recent events in
What I endeavored to do in
the two articles cited by the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences was to attempt to fill these gaps or more exactly to
indicate the direction in which we should move if they are ultimately to be
filled. Let me start with “The
Nature of the Firm.” I went as a
student to the London School of Economics in 1929 to
715
study for a Bachelor of Commerce degree, specializing in
the Industry group, supposedly designed for people who wished to become works
managers, a choice of occupation for which I was singularly ill-suited. However, in 1931 I had a great stroke of
luck. Arnold Plant was appointed
Professor of Commerce in 1930. He
was a wonderful teacher. I began to
attend his seminar in 1931, some five months before I took the final
examinations. It was a revelation.
He quoted Sir Arthur Salter: “The
normal economic system works itself.” And he explained how a competitive
economic system coordinated by prices would lead to the production of goods and
services which consumers valued most highly. Before being exposed to Plant’s teaching,
my notions on how the economy worked were extremely woolly. After Plant’s seminar I had a coherent
view of the economic system. He
introduced me to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” As I had taken the first year of
university work while still at high school, I managed to complete the
requirements for a degree in two years. However, University regulations required
three years of residence before a degree could be granted. I had therefore a year to spare. I then had another stroke of luck. I was
awarded a
I decided to study vertical and lateral integration of
industry in the
I found the answer by the summer of 1932. It was to realize that there were costs
of using the pricing mechanism. What the prices are have to be
discovered. There are negotiations
to be undertaken, contracts have to be drawn up, inspections have to be made,
arrangements have to be made to settle disputes, and so on. These costs have come to be known as
transaction costs. Their existence
implies that methods of coordination alternative to the market, which are
themselves costly and in various ways imperfect, may nonetheless be preferable
to relying on the pricing mechanism, the only method of coordination normally
analyzed by economists. It was the
avoidance of the costs of carrying out transactions through the market that
could explain the existence of the firm in which the allocation of factors came
about as a result of administrative decisions (and I thought it did). In my 1937 article I argued that in a
competitive system
1. A fuller account of these events will be found in
Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter (1991 pp. 34-47)
716
there would be an optimum of planning since a firm, that
little planned society, could only continue to exist if it performed its
coordination function at a lower cost than would be incurred if it were achieved
by means of market transactions and also at a lower cost than this same function
could be performed by another firm. To have an efficient economic system it
is necessary not only to have markets but also areas of planning within
organizations of the appropriate size.
What this mix should be we find as a result of competition. This is what I said in my article of
1937. However, as we know from a
letter I wrote in 1932 which has been preserved, all the essentials of this
argument had been presented in a lecture I gave in Dundee at the beginning of
October, 1932 (see Williamson and Winter, 1991 pp.34—5). I was then 21 years of age,
and the sun never ceased to shine. I could never have imagined that these
ideas would become some 60 years later a major justification for the award of a
Nobel Prize. And it is a strange
experience to be praised in my eighties for work I did in my
twenties.
There is no doubt that the recognition by economists of
the importance of the role of the firm in the functioning of the economy will
prompt them to investigate its activities more closely. The work of Oliver Williamson and others
has led to a greater understanding of the factors which govern what a firm does
and how it does it. And we can also
hope to learn much more in future from the studies of the activities of firms
which have recently been initiated by the Center for Economic Studies of the
Bureau of the Census of the
I know of only one part of economics in which
transaction costs have been used to explain a major feature of the economic
system, and that relates to the evolution and use of money. Adam Smith pointed out the hindrances to
commerce that would arise in an economic system in which there was a division of
labor but in which all exchange had to take the form of barter. No one would be able to buy anything
unless he possessed something that the producer wanted. This difficulty, he explained, could be
overcome by the use of money. A
person wishing to buy something in a barter system has to find someone who has
this product for sale but who also wants some of the goods possessed by the
potential buyer. Similarly, a
person wishing to sell something has to find someone who both wants what he has
to offer and also possesses something that the potential seller wants. Exchange in a barter system requires what
W. S. Jevons called “this double coincidence.” Clearly the search for partners in
exchange with suitable qualifications is likely to be very costly and will
prevent many potentially beneficial exchanges from taking place. The benefit brought about by the use of
money consists of a reduction in transaction costs.
717
The use of money also reduces transaction costs by
facilitating the drawing up of contracts as well as by reducing the quantity of
goods that need to be held for purposes of exchange. However, the nature of the benefits
secured by the use of money seems to have faded into the background so far as
economists are concerned, and it does not seem to have been noticed that there
are other features of the economic system which exist because of the need to
mitigate transaction costs.
I now turn to that other article cited by the
Pigou’s conclusion and that of most economists using
standard economic theory was (and perhaps still is) that some kind of government
action (usually the imposition of taxes) was required to restrain those whose
actions had harmful effects on others (often termed negative externalities).
What I showed in that article, as I
thought, was that in a regime of zero transaction costs, an assumption of
standard economic theory, negotiations between the parties would lead to those
arrangements being made which would maximize wealth and this irrespective of the
initial assignment of rights. This
is the infamous Coase theorem, named and formulated by George Stigler, although
it is based on work of mine. Stigler argues that the Coase theorem
follows from the standard assumptions of economic theory. Its logic cannot be questioned, only its
domain (Stigler, 1989 pp. 631-3). I
do not disagree with Stigler. However, I tend to regard the Coase
theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with
positive transaction costs. The
significance to me of the Coase theorem is that it undermines the Pigovian
system. Since standard economic
theory assumes transaction costs to be zero, the Coase theorem demonstrates that
the Pigovian solutions are unnecessary in these circumstances. Of course, it does not imply, when
transaction costs are positive, that government actions (such as government
operation, regulation, or taxation, including subsidies) could not produce a
better result than relying on negotiations between individuals in the market.
Whether this would be so could be
discovered not by studying imaginary governments but what real governments
actually do. My conclusion: let us
study the world of positive transaction costs.
If we move from a regime of zero transaction costs to
one of positive transaction costs, what becomes immediately clear is the crucial
importance of the legal system in this new world. I explained in “The Problem of Social
Cost” that what are traded on the market are not, as is often supposed by
economists, physical entities, but the rights to perform certain actions, and
the rights which individuals possess are established by the legal system. While we can imagine in the hypothetical
world of zero transaction costs that the parties to an exchange would negotiate
to change any provision of the law which prevents them from taking whatever
steps are required to increase the value of production, in the real world of
positive transaction costs, such a procedure would be extremely costly and would
make unprofitable, even where it was allowed, a great deal of such contracting
around the law. Because of this,
the rights which individuals possess, with their duties and privileges, will be,
to a large extent, what the law determines. As a result, the legal system will have a
profound effect on the working
718
of the economic system and may in certain respects be
said to control it. It is obviously
desirable that these rights should be assigned to those who can use them most
productively and with incentives that lead them to do so and that, to discover
(and maintain) such a distribution of rights, the costs of their transference
should be low, through clarity in the law and by making the legal requirements
for such transfers less onerous. Since this can come about only if there
is an appropriate system of property rights (and they are enforced), it is easy
to understand why so many academic lawyers (at least in the United States) have
found so attractive the task of uncovering the character of such a
property-rights system and why the subject of “law and economics” has flourished
in American law schools. Indeed,
work is going forward at such a pace that I do not consider it overoptimistic to
believe that the main outlines of the subject will be drawn within five or ten
years.
Until quite recently, most economists seem to have been
unaware of this relationship between the economic and legal systems except in
the most general way. Stock and
produce exchanges are often used by economists as examples of perfect or
near-perfect competition. But these
exchanges regulate in great detail the activities of traders (and this quite
apart from any public regulation there may be). What can be traded, when it can be
traded, the terms of settlement, and so on are all laid down by the authorities
of the exchange. There is, in
effect, a private law. Without such
rules and regulations, the speedy conclusion of trades would not be possible.
Of course, when trading takes place
outside exchanges (and this is almost all trading) and where the dealers are
scattered in space and have very divergent interests, as in retailing and
wholesaling, such a private law would be difficult to establish, and their
activities will be regulated by the laws of the State. It makes little sense for economists to
discuss the process of exchange without specifying the institutional setting
within which the trading takes place, since this affects the incentives to
produce and the costs of transacting. I think this is now beginning to be
recognized and has been made crystal-clear by what is going on in
Oliver Williamson has ascribed the nonuse or limited use
of my thesis in “The Nature of the Firm” to the fact that it has not been made
“operational,” by which he means that the concept of transaction costs has not
been incorporated into a general theory. I think this is correct. There have been two reasons for this.
First, incorporating transaction
costs into standard economic theory, which has been based on the assumption that
they are zero, would be very difficult, and economists who, like most
scientists, as Thomas Kuhn has told us, are extremely conservative in their
methods, have not been inclined to attempt it. Second, Williamson has also pointed out
that although I was correct in making the choice between organization within the
firm or through the market the centerpiece of my analysis, I did not indicate
what the factors were that determined the outcome of this choice and thus made
it difficult for others to build on what is often described as a “fundamental
insight.” This also is true. But the interrelationships which govern
the mix of market and hierarchy, to use Williamson’s terms, are extremely
complex, and in our present state of ignorance it will not be easy to discover
what these factors are. What we
need is more empirical work. In a
paper written for a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research, I
explained why I thought this was so. This is what I said: “An inspired
theoretician might do as well without such empirical work, but my own feeling is
that the inspiration is most likely to come through the stimulus provided by the
patterns, puzzles, and
719
anomalies revealed by the systematic gathering of data,
particularly when the prime need is to break our existing habits of thought
(Coase, 1988 p. 71). This statement
was made in 1970. I still think
that in essentials it is true today. Although much interesting and important
research was done in the 1970’s and 1980’s and we certainly know much more than
we did in 1970, there is little doubt that a great deal more empirical work is
needed. However, I have come to the
conclusion that the main obstacle faced by researchers in industrial
organization is the lack of available data on contracts and the activities of
firms. I have therefore decided to
do something about it.
Believing that there is a great deal of data on
contracts and the activities of firms in the United States available in
government departments and agencies in Washington, DC, and that this information
is largely unknown to economists, I organized a conference at the University of
Chicago Law School in the summer of 1990 at which government officials presented
papers in which they described what data was available and how to get access to
it and also reported on some of the research being carried out within their
departments. The audience consisted
of academic economists. It was, as
a colleague remarked, a case of supply meeting demand. The proceedings of this conference will
be published in a special issue of the Journal of Law and Economics. Another development with which I am
associated is the establishment of the Center for the Study of Contracts and the
Structure of Enterprise at the
My remarks have sometimes been interpreted as implying
that I am hostile to the mathematization of economic theory. This is untrue. Indeed, once we begin to uncover the real
factors affecting the performance of the economic system, the complicated
interrelations between them will clearly necessitate a mathematical treatment,
as in the natural sciences, and economists like myself, who write in prose, will
take their bow. May this period
soon come.
I am very much aware that many economists whom I respect
and admire will not agree with the opinions I have expressed, and some may even
be offended by them. But a scholar
must be content with the knowledge that what is false in what he says will soon
be exposed and, as for what is true, he can count on ultimately seeing it
accepted, if only he lives long enough.
References
Coase, R.
H., The Firm, The Market, and the Law,
Demsetz, Harold, Ownership, Control, and the
Firm, Vol. I,
Holmstrom,
Bengt and Tirole, Jean, “The Theory of the
Firm,” in R. Schmalensee and Robert D. Willig, eds., Handbook of
Industrial Organization,
Peltzman,
Sam, “The Handbook of Industrial
Organization: A Review Article,” Journal of Political Economy, February
1991, 99, 20 1-17.
Robbins,
Lionel, The Nature and Significance of
Economic Science,
Stigler,
George J., “Two Notes on the Coase Theorem,” Yale Law Journal, December 1989, 99,
631-3.
Williamson,
Oliver E. and Winter, Sidney G., eds., The
Nature of the Firm, Origins, Evolution, and Development,