Do Transaction Costs Matter for Survival at All Stages of the Industry Lifecycle?

We extend our warmest thanks to Jackson Nickerson and Brian Silverman for many stimulating conversations and much valuable advice. ABSTRACT Research on industry lifecycles demonstrates that competitive pressures are more severe during the shakeout stage, which could be associated with the emergence of a dominant design, than at other stages. Transaction cost theory, on the other hand, assumes generally competitive markets and does not address the industry lifecycle. It therefore implies that transaction cost economizing is a superior firm strategy regardless of the stage of the lifecycle. This paper seeks to reconcile these two streams of research by investigating whether transaction cost economizing has a differential effect on firm survival in pre-shakeout vs. shakeout stages of the industry lifecycle. Analyzing data from the early U.S. auto industry (1917-1933), we find that while transaction cost economizing did not have a significant impact on firm survival during the pre-shakeout stage, or during the period as a whole, it did have a significant positive impact on survival during the shakeout stage. This suggests that applications of transaction cost theory that assume uniformly severe selection pressures across the industry lifecycle could be misleading. It also suggests that theories of the industry lifecycle could usefully take transaction costs into account along with production costs in their analyses of competition over the lifecycle.