O Insurgente

Peter Klein sobre Oliver Williamson (Organisations & Markets)

Briefly, my own (admittedly biased) take is that Williamson is second only to Coase as the key figure in modern organizational economics. Moreover, his work has revolutionized the way economists (and some antitrust lawyers) understand markets. The perfectly competitive general-equilibrium model, Williamson’s work shows, is unrealistic, irrelevant, and a distraction. The task of economists studying firms and markets is to understand the marvelous variety of organizational forms that emerge in competitive markets, virtually none resembling the “firm” of microeconomics textbooks (what Williamson calls the production-function picture of the firm). “Nonstandard” phenomena like vertical integration, vertical contractual restrictions, alliances and joint ventures, long-term supply or distribution agreements, and the like should be celebrated, not condemned. (Williamson is more circumspect, arguing that each form of organization should be evaluated on the merits, case by case — a refreshing contrast to the standard approach in antitrust law, which is to assume that every deviation from perfect competition is “anticompetitive.”)

Vernon Smith (Nobel da Economia em 2002) na Forbes.

I have just returned from an undergraduate multidisciplinary class that my colleague (Bart Wilson) and I teach, “Foundations of Economic Exchange.” Fortuitously, the class readings for today included examples from Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons. Earlier today, after the announcement that she was awarded the Nobel prize in economics, perhaps thousands of economists and journalists would have asked, “Elinor who?” and rushed to the Internet to search online for an answer.

For many of us she has long occupied our radar screen. Let me tell you why.

Podem ler o resto do artigo aqui.

Josh McCabe (The Sociological Imagination)

Williamson’s work on the firm follows that of his teacher (and previous Nobel Laureate) Ronald Coase. Before these guys, the firm was basically the black hole of economics. For starters, no one could explain why they existed in the first place if markets are sooo efficient. Secondly, after just “assuming” them into existence, they were treated as magically devices where inputs went in and outputs came out. This is what the neoclassical firm looks like. Economists couldn’t explain the simply idea of what firms do. Williamson argued sometimes market transaction costs were too high and it was more efficient to use firms were an authority could avoid haggling and holdouts. Another important concept was asset specificity where sometimes there’s just not a market for every product or services, so it’s easier to do it in-house. Steel can sell easily on the open market while steel frames for Honda Accords don’t have much use except for making Honda Accords.

Ostrom’s work is even cooler (and more sociological) in my opinion. Elinor (along with her husband) is the founder of what is called the Bloomington School of political economy. Prior to their work, economists responded in two ways to the tragedy of the commons. You could either privatize that resources or use a whole lot of top-down government regulation. Ostrom challenged both views and found a third meso-level solution. Using ethnographic case studies (!), she found that complex rules often arose among small groups to regulate use and upkeep of the commons.

Peter Boettke sobre Lin Ostrom

Many blog posts already up, especially Alex’s at Marginal Revolution, are fantastic in summary. Other announcements are wrong, but fit the concern that Scott raised earlier today at The Economic Way of Thinking. What Lin’s work demonstrates (…) is how individuals can in a variety of settings work to find (or stumble upon) institutional solutions that promote social cooperation and human betterment. It is about voluntary civic association, a subset of which is commercial life, that her works highlights; not the absence of individual choice. She her wonderful essay “A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action” — which I have summarized as a model of rational choice as if the choosers were human. My blurb on the back of her book, Understanding Institutional Diversity reads as follows: “What emerges from Elinor Ostrom’s book is precisely what the title suggests — an understanding of the diverse nature of institutions that exist in human societies to promote human cooperation or to hinder it. This is a significant work by one of the most thoughtful social scientists in the world and it will attract a large number of readers and enlighten them.”(…)

She is both a methodological individualist (rightly understood) and a spontaneous order theorists. In this regard, Lin Ostrom (and Vincent) have represented one manifestation of the research program in the sciences of man (praxeology) by Mises and Hayek in the 1940s. Actors of limited cognitive capabilities are studied for how the shape and our shaped by the social structures that emerge in a variety of situations to provide voluntary solutions to complex and difficult problems, and they do so in a way that promotes social cooperation under the division of labor.(…) She has done fundamental research on the central idea of Ricardo’s Law of Association as Mises termed it. Humanly rational choice and institutional analysis combine to address the most pressing question in the social world — why do some institutional patterns produce societies of peace and prosperity, while others produce societies that suffer under violence and poverty?

O prémio Sveriges Riksbank de Ciências Económicas em memória Alfred Nobel foi, este ano, atríbuido a Elinor Ostrom e Oliver E. Williamson.

[via Público]