Trust is a fundamental precondition underpinning exchange and economic coordination between heterogeneous agents, but is costly to maintain. Given the potential for agents to enjoy zero-sum gains by opportunistically betraying the trust of exchanging counterparties, an edifice of occupational...

The arrival of information technology in the 1980s and 1990s created an opportunity for business process reengineering. We argue that the arrival of next generation information technology for business - i.e. blockchain - creates a new set of similar opportunities, but this time across entire...

Blockchains are the distributed, decentralised ledger technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We apply Oliver Williamson's transactions cost analysis to the blockchain consensus mechanism. Blockchains reduce the costs of opportunism but are not “trustless”. We show that...