TRANSACTION COSTS THROUGH TIME

Douglass North

Economic History from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: An economic definition of transaction costs are the costs of measuring what is being exchanged and enforcing agreements. In the larger context of societal evolution they are all the costs involved in human interaction over time. It is this larger context that I wish to explore in this essay. The concept is a close kin to the notion of social capital advanced by James Coleman (1990) and applied imaginatively to studying the differential patterns of Italian regional development by Robert Putnam in Making Democracy Work (1993). This essay, therefore, is a study in economic history which focuses on the costs of human coordination and cooperation through time which I regard as the key dilemma of societies past, present and future.

JEL-codes: N (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994-11-25
Note: ascii text, PostScript available, 4187 words
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/eh/papers/9411/9411006.ps.gz (application/postscript)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/eh/papers/9411/9411006.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpeh:9411006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic History from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).