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, numerous hazards might arise that would impede effective contracting. When these hazards are sufficiently large, transactional markets will break down and require alternative, and sometimes elaborate, forms of governance, such as joint ventures, firms, and government institutions. His ideas were codified in his theory of transaction cost economics and were applied across many disciplines in the social sciences. Oliver was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for his contributions. Oliver co-founded the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 1997 (formerly known as the International Society for New Institutional Economics) with fellow Nobel Laureates Ronald Coase and Douglass North to deepen our understanding of organizations and institutions. Oliver was brilliant in his ideas, demanding in his expectations, munificent with his time, gentle in his critiques, and modest in his fame. The Society mourns his passing. In the next few days the Society will be posting a series of short essays honoring his contributions and life.
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 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 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...