Abstract This contribution commemorates Oliver Williamson, who recently passed away, as one of the founding fathers Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). It does so by touching on some details his personal life and connecting these with professional career. The latter was devoted to putting study institutions economic agenda. Closer scrutiny reveals that three phases may be identified. Williamson f...

Forward integration has been explained both as a method of achieving monopoly power and as a source of greater efficiency [6, 16]. An efficiency perspective underpins the work of Chandler and Williamson who regard vertical integration, particularly into distribution, as a crucial step in the creation and success of large firms. While their views have moved closer, Chandler and Williamson emphas...

According to many philosophers, psychological explanation can legitimately be given in terms of belief and desire, but not in terms of knowledge. To explain why someone does what they do (so the common wisdom holds) you can appeal to what they think or what they want, but not what they know. Timothy Williamson has recently argued against this view. Knowledge, Williamson insists, plays an essent...

Bayesian networks are normally given one of two types of foundations: they are either treated purely formally as an abstract way of representing probability functions , or they are interpreted, with some causal interpretation given to the graph in a network and some standard interpretation of probability given to the probabilities specified in the network. In this chapter I argue that current f...

Today we will look at a matrix analog of the standard scalar Chernoff bounds. This matrix analog will be used in the next lecture when we talk about graph sparsification. While we’re more interested in the application of the theorem than its proof, it’s still useful to see the similarities and the differences of moving from the proof of the result for scalars to the same result for matrices. Sc...

Acknowledgements: This paper originated as a presentation given at the conference on " Migration and Mobility: The European Context " at Kingston University on 26-27 April 1999. It is based almost entirely on material from Hatton and Williamson (1998). I am grateful to Jeff Williamson for allowing me to reproduce the results of our joint work and to our publishers, Oxford University Press. Any ...