The WSJ reports that Oliver Williamson has passed away:
When Oliver Williamson was beginning his career in the 1960s, economic models typically treated companies as simple entities that responded rationally to supply, demand and other signals. Dr. Williamson had a hunch that companies could be examined at a much deeper level to determine how they made choices and what sorts of organizational structures worked best.
That hunch led to the New Institutional Economics, which has greatly influenced scholarship on corporate governance, antitrust, and regulation:
Building on the work of Ronald Coase, Dr. Williamson developed transaction-cost economics, examining costs that go beyond the price of a good or service. That work illuminates how people transact with strangers and “build structures that allow us to trust one another,” said Joanne E. Oxley, a University of Toronto professor and former Ph.D. student of Dr. Williamson.
I wrote a review of Williamson's book Economic Institutions of Capitalism, which concludes:
In sum, highly recommended. Be warned, however, that you'll have to put up with Williamson's unfortunate writing style. Although EIoC is largely free of the recreational mathematics that plagues modern economic writing, which is useful for those of us who flunked Differential Equations, it is very jargon-intensive. Worse yet, much of the jargon is self-created. All of which makes reading Williamson an effort-intensive project. Usually the cost-benefit analysis nevertheless comes out in his favor, but sometimes one puzzles out the jargon to find a rather obvious point that could have been conveyed far more simply. (The business about contracting nodes, pp. 32ff, is a classic example.)
I also wrote a review of Williamson's book The Mechanisms of Governance, which opines that:
Williamson's approach provides an analytical framework that is useful not only to economists, but also to lawyers and policymakers. Among other subjects, Williamson tackles such subjects as vertical integration, corporate governance, and industrial organization.
And I quoted a snarky Marketwatch announcement of Williamson's Nobel.