【Speaker】Oliver Williamson, 2009 Nobel Prize for EconomicsLaureate

【Topic】Corporate Governance

【Time】09:40-11:00am, 2010-06-29, Tuesday

【Venue】Room 121, Weilun Building, Tsinghua SEM

【Language】English

【Organizer】Center for Corporate Governance

Background Information

Oliver Eaton Williamson(born September 27, 1932) is an American author in the area oftransaction costeconomics, a student ofRonald Coase,Herbert SimonandRichard Cyert. From 1965 to 1983 he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and from 1983 to 1988, Gordon B. Tweedy Professor of Economics of Law and Organization atYale University. He has held professorships in business administration, economics, and law at theUniversity of California, Berkeleysince 1988. In 2009 he was awarded theNobel Memorial Prize in Economicsfor "his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm", sharing it withElinor 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 aspot marketto meet the daily or weekly needs of anelectric utilitywould 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.

Books published

·Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications, 1975

·The Economic Institutions of Capitalism, 1985

·The Mechanisms of Governance, 1996