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...