From transaction costs to transaction value: Overcoming the frictional paradigm

Abstract

The transaction cost economics has accumulated a mass of dogmatic concepts and assertions that have acquired high stability under the influence of path dependence. These include the dogma about transaction costs as frictions, the dogma about the unproductiveness of transactions as a generator of losses, “Stigler—Coase” theorem and the logic of transaction cost minimization, and also the dogma about the priority of institutions providing low-cost transactions. The listed dogmas underlie the prevailing tradition of transactional analysis the frictional paradigm — which, in turn, is the foundation of neo-institutional theory. Therefore, the community of new institutionalists implicitly blocks attempts of a serious revision of this dogmatics. The purpose of the article is to substantiate a post-institutional (alternative to the dominant neo-institutional discourse) value-oriented perspective for the development of transactional studies based on rethinking and combining forgotten theoretical alternatives. Those are Commons’s theory of transactions, Wallis—North’s theory of transaction sector, theory of transaction benefits (T. Sandler, N. Komesar, T. Eggertsson) and Zajac—Olsen’s theory of transaction value. The article provides arguments and examples in favor of broader explanatory possibilities of value-oriented transactional analysis.