The object of the present essay is neither to overturn transaction cost economics nor to deny the reality of opportunism. Instead, it is to question the explanatory role of the concept of opportunism in the transaction cost analysis of Oliver Williamson and his followers. Williamson has suggested that potential or actual opportunism emerges as the source of the ‘transaction costs’ involved in m...

A large literature has successfully employed transaction cost economic theory to describe how exchange conditions affect the optimal form of organization. However, this approach has historically not accounted for the influence of firm-specific attributes on the governance decision. This paper develops a model based on insights from transaction cost economics, the resourcebased view, and real op...

This paper suggests that a new approach is required to link smallholders with agribusiness in developing countries. This approach combines the use of the new institutional economics, a case study methodology and the lessons of history, to develop some suggestions for the design of a viable and sustainable contract farming model. A case study methodology in the Southern African sugar industry is...

Among the broad range of outsourcing offerings, netsourcing presents an emerging opportunity in the e-business context. Netsourcing allows companies to selectively source software applications from external providers via the Internet. External providers claim cost advantages over in-house development and operations of software applications. Several research streams on strategy however list a nu...

Past research has focused on transaction cost economics as a framework for electronic market (e-market) research. This takes a simplistic view of consumers as economic agents whose primary decision-making criterion is the minimization of transaction costs. We propose that the factors that potentially determine e-market success or failure can be better identified using the Ability–Motivation–Opp...

This paper describes seven alternative product recovery strategies that can be pursued by manufacturers. I then develop empirically testable hypotheses based on industrial organization, transaction cost economics, and the resource-based view to predict which strategies are likely to be pursued by different types of companies.

This paper integrates theoretical concepts from transaction cost economics, organization theory and political economy to develop a conceptual framework to guide research on inter-organizational coordination strategies, particularly those that explicitly leverage IT capabilities. We outline research directions and approaches to bridge the requirements of theory building and theory testing. A Fra...

This research applies transaction cost economics to conceptually investigate longitudinal change of IT outsourcing costs, and its impact on managerial sourcing decisions. I propose that the change of, and underestimation of actual IT outsourcing costs contribute to IT insourcing. Implications and recommendations for future research are provided.

The adoption and use of IOS’s by organizations has proved to be difficult and complicated due to a number of reasons. Accordingly, IOS research has been distributed into multiple streams. This paper discusses four widely used theoretical perspectives and the IOS literature related to each perspective. The perspectives are transaction cost economics, incomplete contracts theory, adoption theory ...