INITIATING "TRANSACTIONS-COST ECONOMICS"

GOLDBERG, V.

Regulation and Administered Contracts.

Worcester MA, The Heffernan Press, 1976. Royal8vo. In the original blue printed wrappers. In "The Bell Journal of Economics": Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring 1976. Entire volume offered. Very light wear to extremities otherwise a very fine and crisp copy (not ex-library). Pp. 426-448 [Entire volume: Pp. 359-736].

First printing of Goldberg important paper in which he was the first first to emphasise the incompleteness of long-term contracts and the key role of long-term contracts in establishing a process for adjusting the terms of the agreement to changing market conditions over time.
The paper initiated together with Williamson's paper published the same year the new field of "transactions-cost economics".

Here he "foresaw the essential similarity between the issues that arise in public utility regulation and the issues in administering a long-term contract: "In searching for a rationale for regulation we should look not at the shape of the long-run average cost curve, but instead at the complexities involved in devising and administering such a contract. Indeed, natural monopoly industries will be characterized in this paper not by their alleged decreasing average costs, but by the features which make long-term relationships between consumers and producers desirable and which further make it extremely difficult to determine at the outset the specific terms of that relationship."" (Biggar, the fifty most important papers in the economics of regulation)

Order-nr.: 50116