Almost a decade ago, Paul Milgrom and John Roberts (1988, p. 450), two of the leaders in the formalist branch of the New Institutional Economics, made the following observation. "The incentive based transaction costs theory has been made to carry too much of the weight of explanation in the...

In an earlier paper, I criticized Schumpeter's account of the obsolescence of the entrepreneur in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. That account rests, I argued, on a confusion about the nature of scientific knowledge and its role in the competences of the firm. This paper is an attempt to...

Recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative, associated with Berle and Means (1932) and Alfred Chandler (1977), in which the American model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable...

At many large universities it is conventional to deliver undergraduate introductory economics courses in a large lecture hall with a live lecturer. However, not surprisingly, casual empiricism suggests that rates of student absenteeism are significantly greater in a large lecture format than in...

This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in history – the scattering of plots in the open fields in the Middle Ages and the transition to the factory system in the Industrial Revolution – to shed light on the uses of institutional economics in economic history. In both of these...

This review essay discusses and appraises Douglas Allen’s The Institutional Revolution (2011) as a way of reflecting on the uses of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) in economic history. It praises and defends Allen’s method of asking “what economic problem were these institutions...

By employing modularity theory, we study the general phenomenon of open-source collaboration, which includes, e.g., collective invention and open science besides open-source software production. We focus on how open-source collaboration coordinates the division of labor. We find that open-source...

Industrial economists tend to think of competition as occurring between atomic units called "firms." Theorists of organization tend to think about the choice among various kinds of organizational structures -- what Langlois and Robertson (1995) call "business institutions." But few have thought...