TRANSACTION COSTS AND THEIR EFFECT ON THE SIZE OF THE ENTERPRISE AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE ECONOMY

Abstract

The paper presents a discursive analysis of the use of the category of “transaction costs”. The similarity of the concepts of “transaction costs’ and “costs of the marketing” by E. Chamberlin is demonstrated. However, in the original discourse of R. Coase, transaction costs are considered as the costs of using the price mechanism associated with the market allocation of resources. The firm, as a hierarchical economic system, was an alternative allocation mechanism to the market. The factors that influence the value of transaction costs in O. Williamson’s contract theory are almost unrelated to sales and the marketing. In the discourse of J. Buchanan and M. Olson transaction costs are costs arising in the political market. For J. Buchanan, these are the “positive” costs of creating new laws that reduce the social costs associated with the production and distribution of public goods. M. Olson’s discourse addresses not only the “positive” but also the “negative” costs associated with dividing markets through government regulation. In turn, R. Coase himself, investigating the problem of social costs associated with external effects, in fact got rid of transaction costs, equating them to zero. It is this situation of “Coase’s theorem” that began to be used in the framework of the analysis methodology of the discipline “Economics and Law”. The paper proposes an interpretation of transaction costs as costs of overcoming the boundaries between heterogeneous systems, based on the discourse of E. de Soto. In this case, the prices of legality/illegality can be viewed as the transaction costs of using different economic systems.