Economics 486
The Economics of Organization

 

Spring 2004
Mondays 2-4:30
Monteith 311
R. N. Langlois
322 Monteith X63472

Office hours MW 9-12 and 1-2 or by appointment

 

View or download the PowerPoint slides

 

Syllabus and Reading List

Texts. I have asked the bookstore to order the following:

  • Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter, eds., The Nature of the Firm. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 (paperback). This is a collection of essays to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Coase's 1937 article (listed below). Readings from this book are denoted W&W in what follows
  • Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. New York: The Free Press, 1985 (paperback).
  • Deirdre McCloskey, Economical Writing. Waveland Press, 2nd edition, 1999. (Recommended.)

Many articles aree available on the web. Some are in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. To read them, you will need the Adobe Acrobat reader. This should already be installed on University microlab computers. But if you don't have it, you can download it for free.

Note also that, for copyright reasons, some links are accessible only from computers connected to the Internet through the UConn domain. If you live off campus and are connecting through a private ISP, check with the computer center about something called a proxy server.

Course requirements.

The grade for the course will be based on six or seven short papers written over the course of the semester. I will assign each paper two weeks before it is due. Each assignment will ask you to write five to ten pages addressing an issue we will cover after the paper's deadline. This will help you -- i.e., force you -- to keep up with the reading. I will deduct one-third of a grade point (e.g., the difference between a B and a B-) for each day the paper is late, and I will not accept the paper at all once we have begun discussing its topic (as to do otherwise would give advantage to procrastinators). This is not a "W" course, so you will not be graded on style, except to the extent that it is impossible to separate form from content and that lousy writing often implies lack of content. The recommended book by McCloskey may be useful to you in improving your writing.

Sequence of Topics.

Transaction-cost economics: overview.

 

The Coasean approach.

  • Ronald H. Coase, "The Nature of the Firm," Economica (N.S.) 4: 386-405 (November 1937).
  • Ronald H. Coase, "The Nature of the Firm: Origin, Meaning, Influence," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 4(1), Spring 1988, reprinted in Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter, eds., The Nature of the Firm. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (W&W.)
  • Steven N. S. Cheung, "The Contractual Nature of the Firm," Journal of Law and Economics 26: 122 (April 1983).
  • Carl Dahlman, "The Problem of Externality," Journal of Law and Economics 22: 141-162 (1979).

 

Moral hazard, monitoring, and measurement costs.

 

Asset specificity.

 

Incomplete-contracts theory.

 

Property rights and ownership.

 

Dispersed knowledge and monitoring.

 

Production costs redux: Economic capabilities.

 

The structure of production.

 

Modular systems.

 

Organization and economic change.

 

The old economy and the new economy.

 

 


FastCounter by bCentral
Since 1/25/01