"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...

A smart contract is an agreement enforced by blockchain technology. It supposedly allows the parties involved to conduct transactions more efficiently than a traditional contract, which is based on legal (costly) enforcement. This chapter challenges this claim. Given the need for an...

This paper seeks to extend the standard assumption concerning incomplete contracts (New Institutional Economics). It is based on a very specific market transaction, within which parties can not affect the market structure. Instead, referring to transaction as introduced by John R. Commons, we...

One of the main contributions of Ronald H. Coase was to demonstrate how mainstream economics was based on a contradictory amalgam of costly physical inputs and free institutional resources, and to gave origin the economics of institutions: each institution is a mode of allocation and...