"Despite abundant literature on transaction costs, there is little to no in-depth analysis regarding what the transaction is or how it works. Drawing on both mainstream and heterodox literature and a variety of interdisciplinary sources, this monograph traces the history of transaction costs in...

This article tries to formulate an institutionalist reassessment of the notion of joint dominance, a market situation in which certain firms indirectly synchronize the conduct in a ‘conscious parallelism’. In this article, the concept of joint dominance is treated as an economic common good...

The legal realist Robert Lee Hale offered a definition of freedom as a zero-sum game: each volitional freedom implies some degree of coercion over other people's freedom and at the same time one's liberty is subject to some degree of control and coercion by others. The objective of our work is...

The ordoliberal distinction between performance competition and impediment competition may improve the understanding of the European distinction between a “dominant position” and an “abuse” of that position. Using a simple game-theory framework, I illustrate the dominant firm as a firm...

To fully understand governance and authority in the large corporation, one must attend to politics. Because basic dimensions of corporate organization can affect the interests of voters, because powerful concentrated interest groups seek particular outcomes that deeply affect large corporations,...

Amartya Sen’s impossibility of a Paretian liberal underscores the trade-off between two widely applied social principles—liberalism and Pareto-optimality: “If someone does have certain liberal values, then he [or she] may have to eschew his [or her] adherence to Pareto optimality” (Sen...

Positional goods and public goods share the characteristic of “publicness” in terms of consumption; i.e., given the consumption of one party, in the case of a positional good, the other must consume a corresponding negative amount of what the first party consumes, while in the case of public...