By Tore Ellingsen
As is customary, the winner of the Williamson Award is chosen by the President (Tore Ellingsen), the President Elect (Robert Gibbons), and the 1.st Vice President (Gillian Hadfield). We are most grateful to the members of the Program Committee for performing the first...
By Tore Ellingsen*
The first time I met Oliver Williamson was in 1986, when he was a guest of honor at the 50 th anniversary of Norwegian School of Economics. At the time I was a first-year PhD student. He encouraged me to take a governance approach to a financial contracting problem I...
By Jens Prüfer
In these Corona-crisis times, many conference organizers are experimenting with different online formats in order to identify what works well and what does not. For instance, during the recent Relational Contracts Workshop , participants could spend the coffee breaks in...
By Andrea Prat
I have had the honor of chairing the 2020 Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award committee. I am very grateful to my fellow committee members: Rocco Macchiavello (London School of Economics), Petra Moser (New York University), and Brian Silverman (University of Toronto)....
By Scott Gehlbach
Every two years, SIOE hands out the Douglass North Best Book Award for the best book in institutional and organizational economics published during the previous two years.
During last week's (virtual) annual conference , the award committee, consisting of Maria...
By Gillian K. Hadfield*
Oliver Williamson was a part of my intellectual journey from the beginning. I had arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1983 for a joint JD-PhD having only been recently disabused of my belief when I chose this combination of law and economics that I had invented...
By Pablo T. Spiller*
One of the less well-known areas of Williamson’s contributions to economics and to the social sciences more generally is in our understanding of public sector institutions. He approached these institutions similarly to how he approached private ones. His view was...
By John de Figueiredo*
As I reflect on Oliver Williamson’s contributions to academics, I realize that he was not only an outstanding scholar, but he was also a generous mentor—generous with his time, generous with his patience, generous with his empathy, and generous with his insights....
By Glenn Carroll**
In the mid-1970s organizational sociology underwent a paradigmatic revolution. A theoretical model of rational goal pursuit through highly adaptable structures known as contingency theory was overthrown by several new perspectives, including the transaction costs...
By Dean V. Williamson*
To answer the question, “What is institutional and organizational economics (IOE)?” would be to go some way toward illuminating the influence of Oliver Williamson on economics and on the social sciences more generally. There was a time, however, when there...
By Benito Arruñada and Giorgio Zanarone*
Oliver Williamson is best known for his theory of the firm—particularly, for the idea that incomplete contracts, opportunism and mutual dependence between firms are the key drivers of vertical integration. However, Williamson always strived to...
By Bob Gibbons*
I came late to Williamson: of my first 25 publications, seven cited him; of the next 25, sixteen did. To me, this trend is significant—and I don’t mean statistically.
In addition to the trend, there is also important variation: what I have learned from Olly has...
By Oliver Hart*
The framework Oliver Williamson developed provided the foundation for my own contributions to the theory of the firm and the theory of contracts. Coase in his extraordinary 1937 article raised the question of why so much activity takes place inside firms, and provided...
By Giorgio Zanarone
The sixth Workshop on Relational Contracts, organized by Marta Troya, Dan Barron, Matthias Fahn, and Giorgio Zanarone, will take place on June 23-24, 2020, on zoom, and will feature a keynote lecture delivered by Pol Antras (Harvard University).
Registration...
By Joanne Oxley*
The story of Oliver Williamson’s relationship to scholarship in international business and international trade in many ways mirrors the story of his relationship to the field of economics writ large . But, it does so in a way that perhaps even more starkly illustrates...
By Paul Joskow *
I have been a student of Oliver Williamson’s for over 50 years. I was first introduced to Olly’s work in 1968 by Richard Nelson, who taught the first semester of the graduate course in industrial organization (IO) at Yale at that time. The course focused heavily on...
By Dean Lueck*
Oliver Williamson had an important, but indirect and complementary effect on the analysis of property rights. At SIOE, the organization Williamson co-founded and nurtured for more than two decades, property rights scholars have thrived....
By Mary Shirley*
At a time when top-down, macro analytics were the norm, Oliver Williamson challenged economists to analyze micro institutions from the bottom up to understand better the barriers to growth in weak institutional environments. When many development economists were...
By Peter Klein*
Oliver Williamson didn’t write much on entrepreneurship but his ideas have important implications for venture formation and growth, new product introduction, the emergence and diffusion of technologies, how firms manage uncertainty, and more. His works are highly cited...
By Claude Ménard*
Among so many contributions of Oliver Williamson, a major one has been the opening of economics to the diversity and richness of solutions for organizing transactions. However, from Markets and Hierarchies (1975) to The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985) and...
By Nick Argyres and Jackson Nickerson*
Oliver E. Williamson did not set out to contribute to the field of strategic management. Yet through his research and devoted teaching of Ph.D. students, he transformed the field.
Before Williamson, strategy scholars had long known that...
By Scott Masten*
Early in my career, I attended a conference at which Oliver Williamson was the discussant for a paper that the author described as an application of Williamson’s transaction cost theory. Although the subject of the paper was an organizational arrangement of interest to...
By Bob Gibbons
The full program of the conference that was planned to be held at MIT consists of 80 sessions. It will be posted in this page in early June---including each paper’s abstract and, if the author(s) so choose, a link to the paper.
There will not be an in-person...
By John de Figueiredo
Oliver Williamson passed away on May 21, 2020 in Berkeley, California. He made a series of seminal contributions to the creation of the field of organizational and institutional economics. Oliver recognized that because contracts are necessarily incomplete,...
By Jens Prüfer
Call for submissions for a Special Issue in Leadership Quarterly on "Harnessing Exogenous Shocks for Leadership and Management Research."
Editors: Philippe Jacquart (Emlyon business school), Simone Santoni (City University of London, Cass Business School), Jost...
By Federica Carugati*
Can ancient societies and online communities teach us something new about governance?
The crisis of democratic capitalism urges us to identify new ways to act collectively to ensure the wellbeing of humans and the environment. Current governance theories...
By Jens Prüfer
The Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, & Culture (ASREC) is organizing a set of “virtual” graduate student workshops.
Time: May 13 and May 27 at 10:30am EST (7:30am PST, 3:30pm London).
Location: Zoom meeting.
Details: Each...
By Tore Ellingsen and Bob Gibbons
Dear SIOE Members,
We hope you and yours are all as well as possible in these unsettling times.
We write with news that is disappointing to us and probably expected by you: after substantial deliberation and consultation, we have decided...
By Sara Lowes*
My dissertation explores the origins and consequences of variation in culture and institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. The first paper is described here.
The second paper in the dissertation (with Eduardo Montero), “The Legacy of Colonial Medical Campaigns”,...
By Giorgio Zanarone
The Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics awards prizes in institutional and organizational economics, named after four Nobel Prize winners closely linked to our society. The awards are
• A Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award (annual). • An...
By Ricard Gil
Economics of Media Workshop: Industrial Organization meets Political Economy , June 12, 2020 – Smith School of Business @ Queen’s University Kingston, ON (Canada)
The aim of the workshop is to bring together leading international researchers interested in the...
By Tore Ellingsen
Please allow me to convey news about our recent election for 2nd Vice President and for Board Members.
Our new 2nd Vice President is:
• Guido Friebel (Goethe University, Frankfurt)
Our three new Board Members are: • Federica Carugati (Stanford...
By Bob Gibbons
In 2020, SIOE will hold its annual conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), beginning late afternoon on Thursday, June 18, and concluding with a gala dinner on Saturday, June 20.
The conference will include two plenary sessions. Late Thursday...
By Sara Lowes*
My dissertation explores the origins and consequences of variation in culture and institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. The first paper, “Matrilineal Kinship and Spousal Cooperation: Evidence from the Matrilineal Belt,” asks how the structure of kinship systems affects...
By Eric Brousseau
LearnIOE is a platform of educational videos aiming at promoting the dissemination of knowledge in institutional and organizational economics (IOE). It was developed by the Governance and Regulation Chair of the Paris Dauphine-PSL University and is based on a very...
By Giorgio Zanarone
The third organizational economics workshop at the Barcelona Summer Forum, organized by Benito Arruñada, Miguel Espinosa and myself, will be on June 15, 2020 , and will feature a keynote lecture delivered by Andrea Prat (Columbia University).
The call for...
By Eric Brousseau
The 19th session of the Institutional and Organizational Economics Academy (IOEA) will be held May 18-22, 2020, in Corsica (France). IOEA has been connected to SIOE since the start and is a summer school targeted at younger scholars with an interest in organizations...
By Giorgio Zanarone
The sixth Workshop on Relational Contracts, organized by Marta Troya, Dan Barron, Matthias Fahn, and myself, will take place on June 23-24, 2020, in Moscow, and will feature a keynote lecture delivered by Pol Antras (Harvard University).
The call for...
By Bob Gibbons
The call for papers of the next annual SIOE conference is open. In 2020, SIOE will hold its annual conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), beginning with a plenary session late afternoon on Thursday, June 18, and concluding with a gala dinner on...
By Guido Friebel, Bob Gibbons, and Maria Guadalupe
This year SIOE presents three panels at ASSA, two of them jointly with the ACES (the Association for Comparative Economic Studies).
All panels' focus is on culture and norms in organizations, and their role in explaining gender...
By Jens Prüfer
The Ronald Coase Institute will hold a Workshop on Institutional Analysis May 10-16, 2020 in Binh Duong New City, Vietnam.
Application deadline : January 11, 2020.
Faculty : Robert Aliber (University of Chicago, emeritus), Douglas Allen (Simon Fraser...
By Stefan Voigt
A number of colleagues at Claremont (CA) will be organizing a workshop on experimental and behavioral public choice on April 1-2, 2020.
The aim of the workshop is to unite researchers working across disciplines in order to discuss how the experimental method and...
Torsten Persson (center) accepts the Williamson Award from SIOE President-Elect Tore Ellingsen and President Francine Lafontaine
By Francine Lafontaine
Background: The Oliver Williamson Best Conference Paper Award is open to all papers accepted for presentation and given at SIOE’s annual meeting. A sub-group of members of the Program Committee, chosen by the program chair Tore Ellingsen, shortlisted a small set...
Sara Lowes receiving the Ronald Coase Award 2019 from SIOE's President-Elect Tore Ellingsen and President Francine Lafontaine
By Pauline Grosjean
I had the pleasure of chairing the 2019 Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award committee. My deepest thanks to my fellow committee members: Renee Adams (our committee member) (Oxford), Andrea Prat (Columbia), and Stephane Saussier (Sorbonne).
What a great vintage...
By Jens Prüfer
The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization invites researchers to submit papers for a special issue on Institutions, Culture and Religion in Economic History for a special issue to be published in Spring 2021.
Submission deadline: April 1 2020
A...
By Brian Silverman*
The session titled “Effects of Law Enforcement” included presentations of three fascinating papers, all related to the impact of legal or regulatory institutions on innovation. The session was held on Friday morning in a well-appointed classroom at the...
By Guido Friebel*
How people get jobs and how well they are suited for the job they do are important determinants for firm efficiency. Ines Black (Duke, Fuqua School of Business) argues that the traditional way to estimate the effects of CEO on firm performance may stop short of giving...
By Bob Gibbons
The SIOE conference 2020 will take place at MIT, Cambridge, Massachussets, from Thursday, June 18, to Saturday, June 20.
Details will be publicized later.
By Anja Shortland
Kidnap for ransom is an ever-present threat in many countries in Central and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and the Asia / Pacific region. Yet, millions of people live, travel, and conduct business in these high-risk areas. Very few of them are...
By Jens Prüfer
Stefan Voigt (University of Hamburg) just published " Institutional Economics ." It addresses "undergraduate and postgraduate students taking their first course on institutional economics, or anyone interested in the subject and its specific subfields."
Here you...
By Jens Prüfer
The Chicago Booth School and LSE have joined forces again to organize the fourth Social Sector Organizations Conference, in London, on September 19-20, 2019. The call for papers is below.
The fourth annual conference on the Economics of Social Sector Organizations...
By Giorgio Zanarone
The Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics awards prizes in institutional and organizational economics, named after the four Nobel Prize winners closely linked to our society. The awards are:
A Ronald...By Giorgio Zanarone
As part of the Barcelona Summer Forum, we are inviting submissions for the 2nd Workshop in Organizational Economics.
The workshop will run for 2 days and will take place on June 17-18, 2019 in Barcelona. We welcome empirical and theoretical submissions of...
By Peter Klein
Harold Demsetz, the inaugural recipient of SIOE's Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award, passed away January 4, 2019. Few scholars did more to advance the field of institutional and organizational economics. Demsetz taught at the University of Michigan (1958-60) and...
By Tore Ellingsen
23rd Annual Conference of the Society for Institutional & Organizational EconomicsJune 27–29, 2019 Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
The SIOE 2019 Program Committee invites you to submit your proposal to present a paper at the conference . Submissions...
By Francine Lafontaine
Dear Colleagues,
I am very pleased to report that Gillian Hadfield , Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto, has been elected as the Second Vice-President of SIOE.
In addition I am pleased to announce...
By Jens Prüfer
Here are two invitations for Ph.D. students, Post-docs and other early-career researchers interested in institutions and/or organizations. Both have taken place for many years and have long alumni lists. Highly recommended!
Institutional and Organizational...
By Jens Prüfer
Datafication has massively influenced processes within organizations, on markets, and more generally throughout society. Machine learning pushes the loop between data accumulation and innovation even further. The Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) and the Governance...
By Lucia Del Carpio and Maria Guadalupe
Role models and reassurance about potential success can impact women’s career decisions.‘What made you decide to join your profession?’ When people are asked this question, they often give answers such as: “I liked such-and-such subject in school...
By Bob Gibbons
The fourth annual Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness will be held at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University during July 8 through 20, 2019. The institute is aimed at assistant professors with demonstrated...
by Peter Klein
Along with Steve Bradley, Phil Kim, Jeff McMullen, and Karl Wennberg I am editing a special issue of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal on "Policy for Innovative Entrepreneurship." We are looking for papers using different approaches, and from a variety of academic...
By Jens Prüfer
Are you new to Organizational Economics? To Institutional Economic research? Or do you know a colleague who has "some interest in political economy of development" or in "contract theory in firms" or in "empirical historical studies about the rules of late medieval cities...
By Marta Troya Martinez
The fourth Workshop on Relational Contracts was hosted by the Becker Friedman Institute and the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago. We* want to particularly thank the Becker Friedman Institute for providing generous funding...
By Jared Rubin*
Today’s rulers of the three largest Middle Eastern economies all look to religious authorities as a key source of legitimacy. Drawing on a broad sweep of historical analysis, this column explores what this might mean for the region’s economic future. One notable danger...
By Jens Prüfer
In her keynote lecture titled " Rethinking the Corporation: Contestable Control, the Theory of the Firm, and the Importance of Historical Perspective ," Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale University) gave a surprising historical account of the corporation as organizational form. While...
By Jens Prüfer
The keynote lecture of Jean Tirole (Toulouse), given at the annual SIOE conference in Montreal in June 2018, titled " Narratives, Imperatives and Moral Reasoning ," and based on joint work with Roland Bénabou and Armin Falk, is now available in our video channe l. After...
By Tore Ellingsen
Dear SIOE members and researchers interested in institutional and organizational economics,
The next annual conference will take place at the Stockholm School of Economics on 27-29 June, 2019 (Thursday to Saturday).
Plenary speakers will be Nathan Nunn...
By Francine Lafontaine
Next to the best paper award, at this year's SIOE conference also a best poster award was handed out for the best poster presentation given. It went to Bertrand V. Quelin (pictured) for his work with Marieke Huysentruyt (both HEC Paris), "Why For-profit Companies...
By Francine Lafontaine
At the SIOE 2018 conference in Montreal, the Oliver Williamson Best Conference Paper Award for the best paper delivered at the conference was awarded to "Vertical Integration, Supplier Behavior, and Quality Upgrading Among Exporters," by Christopher Hansman (...
By Nan Jia
The Ronald H. Coase Best Dissertation Award is handed out annualy for the best doctoral dissertation in institutional and organizational economics. During SIOE's recent conference in Montreal (June 21-23), Nicholas Barnes was awarded the award for his dissertation “Monopolies...
By Scott Gehlbach
During SIOE's recent annual conference in Montreal (June 21-23), several awards were handed out. For each award, a committee of SIOE board members had been formed that reviewed submissions and competitively chose the winners.
The Douglass C. North Research...
By Scott Gehlbach
SIOE will sponsor a session at the upcoming meetings of APSA, the American Political Science Association , to be held in Boston. All conference participants, SIOE members or not, are warmly welcome!
"Understanding Institutions: The Society for Institutional...
By Eric Alston, Lee J. Alston, Bernardo Mueller, and Tomas Nonnenmacher
The notion that “institutions matter” is broadly accepted, and many scholars instead pose the more specific question: under what conditions do a given set of institutions play a role in influencing outcomes of...
By Jens Prüfer
The Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics and Political Science will co-host the third annual conference...
By Bertrand Quelin
We would like to invite you to join a workshop entitled "Hybrid Organizing, Innovation and Social Value Creation: New Perspectives for Strategy" that we are convening as an extension of the forthcoming SMS 38th Annual Conference.
This one-day workshop will be...
By Bruno Chaves
The newly established multidisciplinary program on “Governance Analytics” funded by PSL Research University and hosted by the University of Paris-Dauphine has one opening for a postdoctoral fellowship in data-driven social sciences. The program aims at establishing a...
By Claude Ménard and Mary M. Shirley
In previous posts, we presented a brief summary and abstracts of three chapters of our forthcoming volume.* The table of contents can be found here . Here are three final abstracts of chapters to give a flavor of the book.
A Mutually Beneficial...By Claude Ménard and Mary M. Shirley
In previous posts, we presented a brief summary and abstracts of three chapters of our forthcoming volume.* The table of contents can be found here . Here are three more abstracts of chapters to give a flavor of the book.
What's Next for the...By Claude Ménard and Mary M. Shirley
We posted a brief summary of this forthcoming volume.* The table of contents can be found here . Below are three abstracts of chapters to give you a flavor of the book.
Contracting in Innovative IndustriesBy Richard Gil (Johns Hopkins...
By Claude Ménard and Mary M. Shirley
Younger institutional scholars often ask us: Where should I put my research efforts? What are the most important gaps in our knowledge of institutions? How are emerging technologies and new developments changing the frontier of institutional...
By Giorgio Zanarone
Dear friends and colleagues,
I am happy to announce another workshop that strongly relates to our society's topics. On September 14-15, 2018, the Becker-Friedman Institute and the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago will...
The University of Missouri's Division of Applied Social Sciences seeks applications and nominations for a 9‐month, tenure‐track assistant professor position in agribusiness management, organizational economics and entrepreneurship. The agribusiness program is an interdisciplinary program with...
By Bentley MacLeod
This year the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics calls for nominations for the 2018 Douglass North and 2018 Ronald Coase Awards.
The Douglass North Best Book Award For the best book in institutional and organizational economics published in...By Jens Prüfer
Maybe the longest-running and most successful summer school in IOE, the Institutional and Organizational Economics Academy (IOEA, formerly ESNIE), is inviting applications for its 17th session, which will be held on May 21-25, 2018 in Corsica (France). This incubator for...
By Giorgio Zanarone
I am happy to inform you that for the first time this summer the Barcelona GSE Summer forum will host a workshop in Organizational Economics, organized by Benito Arruñada, Luis...
By Bentley MacLeod
I am pleased to report that Robert Gibbons , Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and Professor of Organizational Economics, MIT has been elected as the Second Vice-President of SIOE.
In addition I am pleased to announce that the three new board members...
By Jens Prüfer
The call for papers for the SIOE 2018 conference, which will be held at HEC Montreal, Canada, on June 21-23, 2018, has been publicized . Keynote lectures will be given by Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale) and Nobel Laureate Jean Tirole (Toulouse), representing nicely SIOE's two...
by Peter Klein
Baylor University's Department of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation is recruiting candidates for a new PhD program in entrepreneurship. This program could be an excellent fit for someone with interests in institutions, policy, strategy, and organization. The focus...
By Jens Prüfer
The Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) advertises a position for a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Economic Governance of Data-driven Markets (starting date: September 2018). This is a three-year position targeted at promising researchers in economics or related...
Guest post by Bertrand Quelin
Hybrid forms of collaboration with mixed economic and social interests represent a phenomenon receiving growing attention in organization science and management studies. Now a special issue on "Public-Private Collaboration, Hybrid Organizational Design and...
By Robert Gibbons
SIOE will organize a session on Contract Governance at the upcoming ASSA Meetings in Philadelphia, January 5-7.
Time: Sunday, January 7, 10:15 to 12:15
Location: Loews Philadelphia in room PSFS
Broadly speaking, “contract governance” means...
by Peter Klein
Twenty years ago (19-21 September 1997), an incredible group of scholars gathered at Washington University, St. Louis for the inaugural conference of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE), later rechristened SIOE. I was privileged to attend and...
By Jens Prüfer
Here is the link to a treasure: Daron Acemoglu (MIT), currently one of the most successful and influential economists studying institutions, put all his lecture slides online .
Some featured course titles:
Political Economy and Collective Choice Political...For your planning, the next SIOE conference will take place in Montréal, Canada, from June 21-23, 2018. A program committee chaired by President-Elect Francine Lafontaine (University of Michigan) will be assembled. The call for papers is expected to be published in November.
For a scenic...
Gillian Hadfield recently published an important new book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy , which is of interest to the SIOE community due to the combination of economics and legal research upon which it draws. Rules for a Flat...
By Henry E. Smith
Many have asked how the new acronym for our society should be pronounced, and there seems to be some variation in practice so far. Although as a linguist I am supposed to be descriptive rather than prescriptive and our society contains many fans of spontaneous order, I...
Relational contracting is a perennial theme at SIOE's annual meeting, and 2017 was no different. A number of presentations ( see , e.g ., Greg Buchak's interesting paper on online peer-to-peer loans ) at this year's meeting underscored the role informal enforcement institutions have played in...
By Jens Prüfer
Imagine two scholars of organizational economics had just won the Nobel Prize and SIOE would like to celebrate that event. What to do? Obviously, you would want the laureates to speak about their work and, in particular, to sketch areas of promising future research. But...
By Jens Prüfer
Last week we put up a video of Matthew Jackson's keynote speech at SIOE 2017 at Columbia University. Now, here is the second keynote lecture: Duncan Watts (Cornell University and Microsoft Research) is speaking about "Computational Social Science: Exciting Progress and...
By Jens Prüfer
Here are two workshop announcements that may be of interest for researchers in IOE :
The Ronald Coase Institute Workshop on Institutional Analysis invites young scholars to apply (December 10-16, 2017, Bogota, Colombia) The Workshop on Economic Governance of Data-...By Jens Prüfer
Matthew Jackson , William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, gave a keynote lecture on "Informal Networks and Formal Institutions" at the recent SIOE 2017 conference at Columbia University. Watch the full one-hour video on SIOE's Youtube channel...
Yoram Barzel (left) during the Award ceremony on 24 June, 2017, with SIOE President-Elect Bentley MacLeod (right).
By Bentley MacLeod
The SIOE Board voted to award the 2017 Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor Yoram Barzel (University of Washington). Professor Barzel got his BA from Hebrew University in 1953, and MA in 1956. He moved to the University of Chicago where he got his PhD...
By Bentley MacLeod
Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award
The finalists for the 2017 Williamsom Award were:
" Competing for Relationships: Markets and Informal Institutions in Sierra Leone ," by Tarek Ghani (WUSTL) and Tristen Reed (World Bank) “ Common Ownership...
Elliott Ash receiving the Best Dissertation Award from SIOE President Sergei Guriev.
By Nan Jia (on behalf of the 2017 Dissertation Award Committee)
Three faculty members were selected to be the finalists for the 2017 Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award. They are Elliott Ash (Assistant professor of economics, the University of Warwick: "Essays in political economy and...
By Scott Gehlbach
What makes for a good conference? The opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. Quality panels with work that challenges and crosses intellectual boundaries. Outstanding plenary sessions. Pleasantly situated receptions and dinners.
And what sort of...
By Peter Klein
The Journal of Institutional Economics is publishing a provocative paper by Benito Arruñada, "Property as sequential exchange: the forgotten limits of private contract."
The contractual, single-exchange framework in Coase (1960) contains the implicit assumption...
By Jens Prüfer
Upon members' request, the Bylaws of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, which were enacted in June 2015, are available online now. They describe the governance structure of the Society and all its internal and external legal relationships....
By Carmine Guerriero (University of Bologna)
While economists have long maintained that weak property rights are detrimental for development since they discourage effort and investment (Besley and Ghatak, 2010), legal scholars have argued instead that they can be optimal whenever...
Scott Gehlbach (Wisconsin-Madison) is a newly elected member of SIOE's board . The following essay introduces him to SIOE.org's readers.
By Scott Gehlbach
I’m back from a stimulating workshop on autocracy at Indiana University. Regina Smyth , Armando Razo , and Michael Alexeev...
Maria Guadalupe (INSEAD) is a newly elected member of SIOE's board . The following essay introduces her to SIOE.org's readers.
By Maria Guadalupe
Even non-binding shareholder votes on CEO pay improve firm performance and shareholder value.In the aftermath of the financial...
Pauline Grosjean (University of New South Wales) is a newly elected member of SIOE's board . The following essay introduces her to SIOE.org's readers.
By Pauline Grosjean
When I moved to Australia 5 years ago, I was struck by a particular phenomenon. It became clear very...
Guest post by Toke Aidt, Daniel L. Bennett, and Boris Nikolaev
(This is the second part of a description of a recent special issue in the European Journal of Political Economy , continuing part 1 )
While economic performance provides an indication of economic well-being, the...
By Jens Prüfer
The Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) and the Governance and Regulation Chair (GovReg) at University Paris-Dauphine, PSL Research University will organize a two-day Workshop on “Economic Governance of Data-driven Markets” at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, on...
Guest post by Toke Aidt, Daniel L. Bennett, and Boris Nikolaev*
For many years, the received wisdom among economists has been that the drivers of economic growth and development are investment in physical capital (machines, buildings, etc.), human capital (education), public...
by Peter Klein
My paper on academic incubators , presented at SIOE in 2014 and forthcoming in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, is featured in the current issue of Inside Higher Ed . Christos Kolympiris and I study the largest, most research-intensive US universities and find that...
By Giorgio Zanarone
The calls for nominations for SIOE's 2017 Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award and 2017 Ronald Coase Dissertation Award are now open. See here fore more information.
By Jens Prüfer
Bob Gibbons has put together a very helpful list of " Conferences Related to Organizational Economics ." This overview, which should be of interest to all SIOE members, not only lists meeting points for interesting work and researchers. It also shows that SIOE runs the...
By Giorgio Zanarone
As I announced in an earlier post, on September 23-24, 2016, CUNEF hosted the second workshop on relational contracts in Madrid. The first workshop was held in 2015 in Munich, and the third one will take place this year at Kellogg. In this post, I briefly summarize a...
By Bob Gibbons
The working group in Organizational Economics meets twice a year as a forum for both regular members of the group and guests to present research on the design and performance of organized transactions (including not only those within organizations but also others such as...
By Jens Prüfer
Here is an interesting job opening for EU citizens with a relevant PhD and expertise in digital markets. We were contacted by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, who mentioned that this may be a very suitable vacancy for a researcher in the field of...
By Giorgio Zanarone
The results of the recent SIOE election are as follows:
By Jens Prüfer
Graduate students and junior faculty members may be interested in two spring schools in institutional and organizational economics, to be held in May 2017, which have upcoming deadlines. One is in Europe, the other one in China. Both have a long history.
IOEA...
The following is the fifth, and last, in a series of guest posts from job market candidates working in Institutional and Organizational Economics (check out the first , second , third , and fourth ). Watch for the rest of the series over the next couple weeks, and think about interviewing one...
The following is the fourth in a series of guest posts from job market candidates working in Institutional and Organizational Economics (check out the first , second , and third ). Watch for the rest of the series over the next couple weeks, and think about interviewing one of these fine...
The following is the third in a series of guest posts from job market candidates working in Institutional and Organizational Economics (check out the first and second . Watch for the rest of the series over the next couple weeks, and think about interviewing one of these fine students if you...
The following is the second in a series of guest posts from job market candidates working in Institutional and Organizational Economics (check out the first, here ). Watch for the rest of the series over the next couple weeks, and think about interviewing one of these fine students if you have...
The following is the first in a series of guest posts from job market candidates working in Institutional and Organizational Economics. Watch for the rest of the series over the next couple weeks, and think about interviewing one of these fine students if you have an opening. (-PLW)
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By Jens Prüfer
Together with the American Economic Association (AEA) and other 55 associations in related disciplines, jointly known as the Allied Social Sciences Associations (ASSA), SIOE participates in a three-day meeting each January to present papers on general economics topics....
By Patrick L. Warren
SIOE likes to highlight new work by young scholars in institutions and organizational economics. This is why we have the Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award . This year, I want to start a new tradition, blatently stolen from David McKenzie at the World Bank...
by Peter G. Klein
In Markets and Hierarchies (1975) and elsewhere, Williamson argues that conglomerate diversification can, under certain circumstances, create economic value by establishing effective internal capital markets. There are large theoretical and empirical literatures...
By Jens Prüfer
The call for papers for the next annual SIOE conference, which will be held at Columbia University, New York, on June 23-25, 2017, has been publicized . It had already been known that, with Matthew Jackson (Stanford) and Duncan Watts (Columbia), two superb keynote...
By Peter Klein
The field of institutional and organizational economics has again been recognized by the Nobel Committee with the awarding of the 2016 prize to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström . The Laureates have made foundational contributions to contract theory, the theory of the firm,...
By Jens Prüfer
Papers submitted to the annual SIOE conferences undergo a thorough review process. For the 2016 conference in Paris, each individually submitted paper was anonymously evaluated for its academic quality by two members of the program committee, chaired by Sergei Guriev. The...
By Peter G. Klein
Steve Bradley and I have edited a symposium in the August 2016 Academy of Management Perspectives on "Institutions, Economic Freedom, and Entrepreneurship: The Contributions of Management Scholarship." Researchers in management and entrepreneurship are increasinly...
by Patrick L. Warren
In a continuing series, I want to mention another great session I attended at SIOE this year for people who either couldn't make it to Paris or had a conflicting session. This session, on personnel economics, was an interesting mix of theory and data that changed how...
By Marian Moszoro
Who does a better job in managing money—Democrats or Republicans?
A recent paper of mine—which explores this question using individual partisan contributions and equity hedge fund managers’ performance—received some attention in the media. Here is a link to the...
By Giorgio Zanarone
Relational contracts--that is, collaborative agreements that are too rooted in the parties' informal relationship to be enforced by courts--have emerged in recent decades as a powerful tool to understand institutions and organizations. Reflecting this fact, a yearly...
By Patrick L. Warren
At this year's Law and Economics session at the NBER Summer Institute , I saw a fascinating paper by Corrado Giulietti , Mirco Tonin , and Michael Vlassopoulos entitled " Racial Discrimination in Local Public Services: A Field Experiment in the US. " In it, the...
By Ruben Enikolopov
Recent events in Turkey attracted a lot of attention and raised a lot of question about the situation in the country. The more iteresting it is to read the paper by Daron Acemoglu and Murat Ucer that describes the evolution of economic and political institutions in...
By Patrick L Warren
I attended a great session in Paris this year, and I wanted to commend it to everyone's attention. It included three papers looking at how thinking carefully about relational contracts can affect how we understand firms' financing decisions. It changed how I think. I'...
By Josiah Ober
Distillation of the core argument of " The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece."
History is an obvious testing ground for the competing theories about the relationship between institutions and economic growth. But most historical tests of core ideas in political...
By Sergei Guriev
Every year, the Society awards the Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award to the best paper presented in the SIOE’s Annual Conference. The paper is chosen by an Award Committee made of several members of the conference’s Program Committee and is chaired by the...
By Henry E. Smith
This year’s Douglass C. North Research Award was presented at the annual meeting at Sciences Po in Paris to Josiah Ober of Stanford University for The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press, 2015).
The book shows that, contrary to...
By Patrick L. Warren
I recently read two papers about English-only education in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century that I found extremely interesting and wanted to share. For background, several states instituted English-only education policies in the lead up and aftermath of...
By Jens Prüfer
During the recent SIOE conference in Paris, a short video was produced, introducing both the Society and the conference. It may provide an interesting glimpse for those who did not have the chance to attend the gathering - or those who are curious to see whether they were...
By Marian Moszoro
In the restrooms at a government school of a leading university the following announcement was posted:
“We are happy to announce that CGIS will now feature:
* 100% recycled paper products
[...] The benefits of these changes include:...
By Henry E. Smith
As outgoing President of SIOE, I gave a brief Presidential Address this year at the meeting in Paris. Thanks again to Sergei Guriev for doing a wonderful job on the conference!
The slides are here . Let me say a few words on the topic.
Presidential...
Review by Dan Barron and Mike Powell
To understand organizations, we have to understand their dynamics: how they grow, how they change, and importantly, how and why they fail. “Why Organizations Fail: Models and Cases” (recently published in the Journal of Economic Literature ; ungated...
By Peter Klein
That's the title of a new AER paper by Wouter Dessein, Andrea Galeotti, and Tano Santos (ungated version here ). They model formally the problem of organizational adaptation when tasks are interdependent, but some tasks are more "influential" than others. If the costs of...
By Jens Prüfer
The new SIOE.org website has been online for one year now. To make best use of this tool, we would like to ask you for your opinion by filling in a short survey:
Click here to access the survey!
It will not take more than 5 minutes but you could give us...
By Marian Moszoro
In early May 2016, it was made public that Malia Obama, the oldest of President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama’s two daughters, will attend Harvard College, but after a gap year (see, e.g., CNN, “ Malia Obama to attend Harvard after gap year ”).
The...
By Sergei Guriev
The SIOE 2016 program has just been published on the conference homepage. About 250 papers, covering all areas of Institutional and Organizational Economics, have been selected by the program committee. They will be given in 11 parallel sessions and rounded up by...
By Peter Klein
The LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog recently published lists of the all-time most-cited books and articles in the social sciences. Not surprisingly, institutional and organizational economics is well represented on the lists. Douglass North's Institutions, Institutional...
By Patrick L. Warren
In the past several years, there have been a number of high-profile public releases of private data, including Wikileak's diplomatic cables, Edward Snowden's NSA documents, emails at Sony Entertainment, the Panama Papers, and the user databases at Ashley Madison, OK...
By Bentley MacLeod
The annual SIOE conference in 2017 will be held at Columbia University, NY. It is planned to start the morning of June 23 (Friday) and go to noon, June 25 (Sunday). The Gala Dinner will take place on Saturday night. Keynote lectures will be given at 5pm on Friday and...
By Marian Moszoro
Recently, Mauricio Macri—a former successful businessman—was appointed President of Argentina. Right from the spot, he showed a managerial grit. Apart from stylized examples and anecdotal evidence, it is rare the case when we can study how politicians and managers...
By Jens Prüfer
(How) can democracy, as we know it, survive in times of strongly increasing market power of a few online media aggregators?
Let us take this fundamental question in pieces. First, why should “democracy, as we know it,” be at stake? A few months ago, an article by...
By Patrick L. Warren
Roland Fryer recently released a working paper summarizing the RCT evidence on educational interventions in the developed world. I learned a lot from reading it and commend it to your attention. In Bloomberg, Noah Smith provided a nice summary of the main points,...
Peter Klein
The concept of tacit knowledge -- knowledge that is difficult or impossible to parameterize, or to express in words or numbers -- is central to organization theory, as well as philosophy (Polanyi) and social theory more generally (Hayek). Most of the research literature on...
By Orie Shelef
Risk taking is central to economic growth, entrepreneurship, and innovation, yet poor risk taking can have drastic consequences. Much of the research on risk-taking incentives has focused on balancing risk-reward trade-offs, while classic research on incentives has...
By Patrick L. Warren
Today I stumbled upon a great resource put together by the Poverty Action Lab outlining the uses of administrative data in field research. But even more exciting is an amazing document they have created detailing how to gain access to some of the biggest...
By Patrick L. Warren
I wanted to commend a fascinating paper to your attention, " Can I Have Permission to Leave the House? Return Migration and the Transfer of Gender Norms " by Michele Tuccio and Jackline Wahba. In it, Tuccio and Wahba investigate how Jordanian women's self-reported...
By Ricard Gil
I could not believe my friends the first time I heard of the Atkins diet. “What? You lost 10 kilos by pigging out on steak and sausage? Please stop teasing me.” This was indeed my incredulous reaction any time an acquaintance told me about their experience, until somebody...
By Patrick L. Warren
In celebration of International Women's Day, I went looking for recent papers that examined the role of women in organizations. I learned a lot, and wanted to share some of the papers I found with our members, separated into two broad themes: the effects of exposure...
By Jens Prüfer
The calls for nominations for the 2016 Douglass C. North and 2016 Ronald Coase Awards are now open.
The Douglass C. North Research Award will be awarded for the best paper or book in institutional and organizational economics published in the calendar years 2014...
By Marian Moszoro
A university endowment is a pool of money that comes from donors who want to help fund the operations and mission of the university, while minimizing the dependency on tuitions and public transfers. Endowments create the financial stability that allows universities to...
By Lisa Bernstein
Last week I started to introduce a recent symposium issue of the Journal of Legal Analysis on Private Orderings that contains papers from a conference sponsored by the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, in September 2014...
By Stéphane Saussier
Just before SIOE 2016 - and thereby easily combinable - a conference on "Contracts, Procurement, and Public-Private Arrangements" will take place at the Sorbonne Business School in Paris. This conference focuses on the recent developments in contract theories....
By Lisa Bernstein
SIOE members might be interested in a recent symposium issue of the Journal of Legal Analysis on Private Orderings that contains papers from a conference “sponsored by the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, in September...
by Patrick L. Warren
Every Fall, I teach a PhD course that is putatively on the topic of political economy, but at least half the course is dedicated to the practice of building economic models. The philosophy of modelling I expouse is firmly practical, and it starts with some mystery...
By Jackson A. Nickerson and Brian S. Silverman
The field of strategy draws on several cognate disciplines, with the goal of addressing one overarching question: Why are some firms able to obtain sustainable competitive advantage (i.e., consistently higher profits than competitors)? In...
By Patrick L. Warren
This is how the #IowaCaucus works. A tie is solved tossing a coin @HillaryClinton wins pic.twitter.com/yZDTUKFJXQ
— Fernando Peinado (@FernandoPeinado) February 2, 2016
By Marian Moszoro
Contemporary history unveils a sophistication of financial markets and instruments—in an interplay of asymmetry of information, principal-agent disconnect, and externalities—to the extent of making them vague and obscure to common understanding. For many years, I have...
By Peter Klein
The Open Syllabus Project is a useful repository of course reading lists from almost every academic discipline. A fun feature is the ability to browse by popularity , i.e., to see the most frequently assigned readings in a particular field. Of course, the sample consists...
By Jens Prüfer
“What roles do culture and institutions play in determining the wealth of nations?” is the billion dollar-question that Paola Giuliano and SIOE 2016 keynote speaker Alberto Alesina put forward in their recent JEL-article, “Culture and Institutions.”
Related to...
By Peter Klein
Pierre Azoulay has written a number of important and interesting papers on the economics and sociology of science: How does teamwork effect science? What are the relationships among scientists and students, collaborators, and rivals? A new paper with Christian Fons-Rosen...
By Patrick L. Warren
I'm back this week to finish up my report on the SIOE session at ASSA. But first, a reminder. Submissions for SIOE2016 were due yesterday, but I think you can probably sneak a late submission in today. Go to the portal and submit today .
The next paper, "...
by Patrick L. Warren
Yesterday afternoon, SIOE sponsered a session at the ASSAs in San Francisco entitled "Institutions, Organization, and Entrepreneurship", organized by my colleague Andy Hanssen. In case you weren't able to make it, I wanted to give a brief summary of the papers, which...
By Giorgio Zanarone
Dear SIOE Membership,
The results of the recent SIOE election are as follows:
Second Vice President
- Francine Lafontaine (University of Michigan)
Board of Directors
- Lisa Bernstein (University of Chicago Law School)...
By Marian Moszoro
Hedge funds’ performance is measured against their benchmark called “bogey,” which in golf means a score of one stroke over “par” at a hole. It puzzeled me why hedge fund managers would use and be evaluated against a measure that is inferior to the expected benchmark...
By Eric Brousseau
From the 16th to the 20th of May 2016 in Corsica (France), the 15th session of the Institutional and Organizational Economics Academy (ex-ESNIE) will take place.
Using rigorous scientific methods, Institutional and Organizational Economics focuses on the...
By Patrick L. Warren
In the "research you can use" department, I was reminded today of a small literature on management in higher education. There was a nice paper published in EJ a year back by John McCormack, Carol Propper, and Sarah Smith entitled "Herding Cats? Management and...
By Jens Prüfer
Just a few days after the SIOE conference in Paris (15-17 June 2016), the First Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe (CELSE) will take place at the University of Amsterdam, on 21-22 June 2016. This may offer a good opportunity to connect both events.
...
By Marian Moszoro
Since Coase (1960), the perspective on property has been contractual and the economic analysis of contracts has focused on single-exchange in-personam enforcement, where only use-related externalities arise, transaction costs are internalized by the parties, and...
By Jens Prüfer
The economic consequences of Christian doctrines have gained great attention since at least Max Weber's “work ethic” hypothesis, that the Protestant Reformation was instrumental in facilitating industrial capitalism - and economic prosperity with it - in Western Europe (...
By Peter Klein
Barry Weingast offers this nice tribute to Douglas North at EH.Net:
With the passing of Doug North Monday night, the world lost one of the great economists of the last century. Doug was known for his intense curiosity and his relentless – and even mischievous –...
By Peter Klein
I posted some brief remarks on Doug North yesterday. John Nye and Mike Sykuta have also written personal reminscenses. Doug was of course one of the co-founders of SIOE's predecessor organization, ISNIE, and served as ISNIE's second president. He will be greatly missed.
As many of you have probably heard, Douglass North passed away yesterday. Professor North was a founding member of our society and his influence on our field has been enormous. I did not did not know him well, so I will leave it to other to memorialize his life. But I thought it important to...
By Jens Prüfer
At the upcoming ASSA meetings in San Francisco (January 3-5, 2016), the prime conference on social sciences (including the annual meeting of the American Economic Association), SIOE will host an academic session on "Institutional Design and Organizational Performance."...
By Patrick L. Warren
We spend a lot of time and identifying and talking about superstars: in sports, in business, in academia. I'm guilty too, in my (mostly failed) Nobel prediction from a couple weeks back. My colleague teased us all with Jennifer Lawrence last week, surely a superstar...
By Ricard Gil
Let me first get out of the way whatever is crossing your mind right now. Jennifer Lawrence IS NOT attending SIOE next year and (to the best of my knowledge) she has not made public any statements that she will in the future. Sorry pal if I misled you for a second. What...
By Jens Prüfer*
Throughout the last years, the rate of technological progress has accelerated. To a large extent this development was driven by the increasing availability of data, owing to the fact that more and more economic and social transactions take place aided by information and...
By Marian Moszoro & Henry E Smith
Case law used to require analytical thinking and a huge dose of memory to link a large number of court cases and opinions. This is changing, at least in the later aspect. In the last decades, law publishers have started digitizing and distributing...
By Patrick L. Warren
At a conference this weekend, I learned that the NSF has a grant-making program on the science of organizations . Maybe everyone but me knew this, but I thought I'd mention it to our membership in case I wasn't alone in my ignorance. From their latest call for...
By Jens Prüfer
Martin Nowak (Harvard) gave a keynote lecture on "The Evolution of Cooperation" at the 2015 annual SIOE conference at Harvard Law School. The full video (about 1 hour long) can be viewed here .
By Patrick L. Warren
When deciding amongst job offers, a job seeker must often compare them along a number of important dimensions: wage, working conditions, opportunities for advancement, insurance benefits, retirement packages, vacation and family leave, just to name few. For parsimony...
By Sergei Guriev
The next annual SIOE conference, to be held at Sciences Po, Paris, will take place from Wednesday, June 15, until Friday, June 17, 2016. More information and a call for papers will be posted in the next weeks.
By Ruben Enikolopov
Network analysis is one of the "hot topics," which attracts more and more attention and plays an increasingly important role in the analysis of a wide range of questions in economics, ranging from macroeconomic fluctuations (see The Network Origins of Aggregate...
By Ruben Enikolopov
Institutions are often defined as “rules of the game” that include both formal and informal constraints on agents’ behavior. Academic research (at least in economics) has traditionally focused more on formal institutions, whereas informal ones, such as beliefs,...
By Peter G. Klein
I've written some posts at Organizations and Markets that are skeptical of randomized-controlled trials — not the technique itself, but the way it is over-hyped by its proponents. Our newest Nobel Laureate, Angus Deaton, is also a critic of RCTs as used in development...
By Patrick L. Warren
A while back I suggested state government contracts might be an interesting data source for many of our members. Today, I want to briefly introduce you to another exciting data set: government financial securitiies through the Electronic Muncipal Market Access (EMMA...
By Marian Moszoro
The literature on contracts has focused on transaction costs and contractual hazards, incentives and commitment, incompleteness, verifiability, and reference points, and relational contracting and the value of future business to explain contract features and the degree...
By Patrick L. Warren
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics will be announced in a little under a week (formally, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). We all know that the first three Presidents of our organization each won the Prize ( Coase in 1991,...
By Jens Prüfer
Michael Whinston (MIT) gave a keynote lecture on "Property Rights and the Efficiency of Bargaining" at the 2015 annual conference at Harvard Law School. The full video (about 1 hour long) can be viewed here .
By Jens Prüfer
Building bridges between the research communities studying Institutions & Organizations, on the one hand, and Behavioral and Experimental Economics, on the other hand, was the goal of the TILEC ( Tilburg Law and Economics Center ) workshop on Economic Governance and...
By Patrick L. Warren
Several weeks back, I had a brief twitter discussion with Victor Fleischer about his proposal in a NY Times Op-Ed to require require universities with endowments in excess of $100 million to spend at least 8 percent of the endowment each year. That conversation has...
By Peter Klein
The distinguished historian of technology Nathan Rosenberg passed away this week. Here are tributes from Josh Gans at Digitopoly and Dick Langlois at Organizations and Markets . As Josh puts it: "If Rosenberg was known for one thing, it was to bring economics, real...
By Jens Prüfer
About 25 years ago, Avner Greif and his co-authors set out to study how the rise, mechanics, and decline of certain institutions in the European middle ages can be explained by the help of game theory (Greif 1989, 1993; Greif, Milgrom, and Weingast 1994). Soon it became...
By Ricard Gil
Two years ago in December 2013 a great tradition started: the Finance, Organizations and Markets Conference first pushed by Gordon Phillips (USC Marshall) and more recently by others such as Kevin Murphy (USC Marshall) or Amit Seru (Chicago Booth). This year (after very...
By Marian Moszoro
Empirical testing has become the touchstone of sound economic theory, especially in the era of big data. In this article, we review some simple (and not-so-simple) algorithmic data reading techniques that may be applied to create novel datasets from textual documents...
By Ricard Gil
A recurring topic of research at ISNIE in the past and at SIOE in the future has been empirical work on vertical integration. In that literature, most work has concentrated around transaction cost economics (TCE) but yet empirical evidence on property rights theories (PRT...
By Jens Prüfer
The Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley and the Sorbonne Business School are organizing the second joint workshop on Organizational Economics. The event will take place at Sorbonne Business School (University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne) on...
By Scott E. Masten
Transaction cost economics (TCE) and the New Institutional Economics (NIE) have been virtually synonymous since the 1975 publication of Oliver Williamson’s Markets and Hierarchies , with its first chapter titled “Toward a New Institutional Economics.” Pretty much...
By Patrick L. Warren
As public information laws have strengthened over time in the US States, many states have taken the preemptive step of posting commonly requested documents online. This has led to a nice collection websites of contracts with state governments. The depth and quality...
By Peter G. Klein
"Robert Bork’s Forgotten Role in the Transaction Cost Revolution"
Alan J. Meese Antitrust Law Journal 79, no. 3 (2014)
This essay, prepared for a conference examining Robert Bork’s antitrust contributions, examines Bork’s hitherto unknown role in the...By Jens Prüfer
“Economic Governance and Social Preferences” is the title of a workshop that will be held in Tilburg, The Netherlands, on September 3-4, 2015. The Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) organizes the event in order to bring together scholars from institutional and...
By Patrick L. Warren
Under the Resources tab, under the "Our Field" heading, you can find links to many recent syllabi for classes on organizational and institutional economics throughout the world. But I wanted draw your particular attention to an especially fine set of notes , at the PhD level, on modern organizational economics. These notes were written by Michael Powell at Northwestern Kellogg (with an assist from Dan Barron ), and they cover the most basic version of some of the workhorse models in our discpline. They are great for brushing up on a model you are already familiar with or for learning the key intuitions of something new. As you might expect, given Mike and Dan's background, the notes on relational contracting are particularly good, but all the topics are excellent. They are clear, acccessible, and I commend them to your attention.
By Marian Moszoro
"Birds of a feather flock together," goes the saying. At ISNIE/SIOE, it fits perfectly to its commencement and further development. The Society’s first two presidents were Nobel laureates in economics at the time they served—Ronald Coase won the prize in 1991 and Douglass North in 1993—and the third president, Oliver Williamson, received the award some years later in 2009. Also Elinor Ostrom, a co-recipient with Williamson of the distinction, was an active member of ISNIE.
By Sergei Guriev
The debate on the role of institutions has changed dramatically since ISNIE was established in 1996. Research on institutions has become part of economics mainstream. Qualitative and descriptive studies have been complemented by increasingly rigorous quantitative work applying modern and sophisticated econometric methods. Academics in general and ISNIE members in particular, have learnt a lot, not only about correlations but also about causal relationships. There are still many open questions: we do not have a consensus on measuring institutions, on quantitative importance of different kinds of institutions for growth and development and on the factors that may drive the heterogeneity of the impact of institutions. Yet, there is no longer any doubt that institutions are important for economic performance and social development. This leads to a key challenge for our Society – as we are certain that institutions matter we should also try to understand where the institutions come from. Given the importance of this question for policymaking, it must be addressed using research methods of highest academic quality, whether they are qualitative or quantitative studies.
By Henry E. Smith
As an important set of social institutions, law and the legal system have played an important part in the development of the Institutional and Organizational Economics (IOE). And while a good number of legal scholars use institutional and organizational economics in...
By Patrick L. Warren
A key feature of non-profits, emphasized by Glaeser and Shleifer (2001) , is that the non-distribution constraint allows the firm to commit to weak incentives. Put simply, if I cannot take profits home with me, I have to do something else with them and those...
By Jens Prüfer
The 19th Annual Conference of The International Society for New Institutional Economics (soon to be renamed The Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, SIOE) will be held at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 18 – 20, 2015.
By Peter Klein
Corporate culture is hard to define and measure (Kreps’s game-theoretic version is probably the one most familiar to economists), but may play a role in explaining variation in firm performance ( Kreps's game-rethoric ). Of course, one should not invoke “culture” as an explanation for outcomes without specifying some microfoundations . And culture may be as much the result of firm performance as the cause.
SIOE is sorry to report that Ronald Coase, one of ISNIE's founders, passed away on Monday September 2nd at the age of 102.
Professor Coase, honored with the Nobel Prize in 1991, was not only a scholar important to all economists, but one that changed the rules of...
The calls for nominations for the 2015 Elinor Ostrom and 2015 Ronald Coase Awards are now open. The submission deadlines are April 15.