Oliver Eaton Williamson (born September 27, 1932) is a prominent author in the area of

transaction cost economics, a student of Ronald Coase, Herbert Simon and Richard Cyert.
Williamson received his B.Sc. in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in
1955, M.B.A. from Stanford University in 1960, and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University
in 1963. He has held professorships in business administration, economics, and law at the
University of California, Berkeley since 1988 and is currently the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor
Emeritus at the Haas School of Business. In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economics for "his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm",[1]
sharing it with Elinor Ostrom.
His focus on the costs of transactions has led Williamson to distinguish between repeated case-
by-case bargaining on the one hand and relationship-specific contracts on the other. For example,
the repeated purchasing of coal from a spot market to meet the daily or weekly needs of an
electric utility would represent case by case bargaining. But over time, the utility is likely to form
ongoing relationships with a specific supplier, and the economics of the relationship-specific
dealings will be importantly different, he has argued.
Other economists have tested Williamson's transaction-cost theories in empirical contexts. One
important example is a paper by Paul L. Joskow, "Contract Duration and Relationship-Specific
Investments: Empirical Evidence from Coal Markets," in American Economic Review, March
1987. The incomplete contracts approach to the theory of the firm and corporate finance is partly
based on the work of Williamson and Coase.[2]
Oliver Williamson is credited with the development of the term "Information Impactedness",
which applies in situations where it is difficult to ascertain what the costs to information are.
This condition exists
"mainly because of uncertainty and opportunism, though bounded rationality is involved as well.
It exists when true underlying circumstances relevant to the transaction, or related set of
transactions, are known to one or more parties but cannot be costlessly discerned by or displayed
for others." Market and Hierarchies

Elinor Ostrom (born August 7, 1933) is an American political scientist. She was awarded the
2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson,
for "her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons".[1] She is the first woman to
win the prize in this category. She is also the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science,
and Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University
Bloomington. In addition, she is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of
Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University.

• William C. Mitchell. "Virginia, Rochester, and Bloomington: Twenty-Five Years of

Public Choice and Political Science", Public Choice, 56 (1988), 101-119.
• Aligica, Paul Dragos; Boettke, Peter (2009). Challenging Institutional Analysis and
Development: The Bloomington School. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-77820-6.
• Hart, Oliver, (1995), Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure. Oxford University Press,
ISBN 0198288816.