Transaction cost
In economics and related disciplines, a transaction cost is a cost in making any economic trade when participating in a market.[1] The idea that transactions form the basis of economic thinking was introduced by the institutional economist John R. Commons in 1931, and Oliver E. Williamson's Transaction Cost Economics article, published in 2008,[2] popularized the concept of transaction costs.[3] Douglass C. North argues that institutions, understood as the set of rules in a society, are key in the determination of transaction costs. In this sense, institutions that facilitate low transaction costs, boost economic growth.[4]
Williamson defines transaction costs as the costs of running an economic system of companies, and unlike production costs, decision-makers determine strategies of companies by measuring transaction costs and production costs. Transaction costs are the total costs of making a transaction, including the cost of planning, deciding, changing plans, resolving disputes, and after-sales.[5] Therefore, the transaction cost is one of the most significant factors in business operation and management.[6]
Douglass North states that there are four factors that comprise transaction costs – "measurement", "enforcement", "ideological attitudes and perceptions", and "the size of the market".[4] Measurement refers to the calculation of the value of all aspects of the good or service involved in the transaction.[4] Enforcement can be defined as the need for an unbiased third party to ensure that neither party involved in the transaction reneges on their part of the deal.[4] These first two factors appear in the concept of ideological attitudes and perceptions, North's third aspect of transaction costs.[4] Ideological attitudes and perceptions encapsulate each individual's set of values, which influences their interpretation of the world.[4] The final aspect of transaction costs, according to North, is market size, which affects the partiality or impartiality of transactions.[4] Dahlman (1979) categorized the content of transaction activities. In short, the so-called transaction cost refers to the various costs of information search, condition negotiation and transaction implementation that are accompanied by transaction behavior.[7]
Transaction costs can be divided into three broad categories:[8]
For example, the buyer of a used car faces a variety of different transaction costs. The search costs are the costs of finding a car and determining the car's condition. The bargaining costs are the costs of negotiating a price with the seller. The policing and enforcement costs are the costs of ensuring that the seller delivers the car in the promised condition.
Examples[edit]
A supplier may bid in a very competitive environment with a customer to build a widget. However, to make the widget, the supplier will be required to build specialized machinery which cannot be easily redeployed to make other products. Once the contract is awarded to the supplier, the relationship between customer and supplier changes from a competitive environment to a monopoly/monopsony relationship, known as a bilateral monopoly. This means that the customer has greater leverage over the supplier such as when price cuts occur. To avoid these potential costs, "hostages" may be swapped to avoid this event. These hostages could include partial ownership in the widget factory; revenue sharing might be another way.
Car companies and their suppliers often fit into this category, with the car companies forcing price cuts on their suppliers. Defense suppliers and the military appear to have the opposite problem, with cost overruns occurring quite often. Technologies like enterprise resource planning (ERP) can provide technical support for these strategies.
An example of measurement, one of North's four factors of transaction costs, is detailed in Mancur Olson's work Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development (1993) – Olson writes that roving bandits calculate the success of their banditry based on how much money they can take from their citizens.[16] Enforcement, the second of North's factors of transaction costs, is exemplified in Diego Gambetta's book The Sicilian Mafia: the Business of Private Protection (1996). Gambetta describes the concept of the "Peppe", who occupies the role of mediator in dealings with the Sicilian mafia – the Peppe is needed because it is not certain that both parties will maintain their end of the deal.[17] Measurement and enforcement comprise North's third factor, ideological attitudes and perceptions – each individual's views influence how they go about each transaction.[4]
Game theory[edit]
In game theory, transaction costs have been studied by Anderlini and Felli (2006).[22] They consider a model with two parties who together can generate a surplus. Both parties are needed to create the surplus. Yet, before the parties can negotiate about dividing the surplus, each party must incur transaction costs. Anderlini and Felli find that transaction costs cause a severe problem when there is a mismatch between the parties' bargaining powers and the magnitude of the transaction costs. In particular, if a party has large transaction costs but in future negotiations it can seize only a small fraction of the surplus (i.e., its bargaining power is small), then this party will not incur the transaction costs and hence the total surplus will be lost. It has been shown that the presence of transaction costs as modelled by Anderlini and Felli can overturn central insights of the Grossman-Hart-Moore theory of the firm.[23][24]
Oliver E. Williamson (1975)[25] stated that evaluative mechanisms consist of seven variables, namely, Bounded Rationality, Atmosphere, Small Numbers, Information Asymmetric, Frequency of exchange, asset specificity, uncertainty, and threat of opportunism.[26]
The merit of Coase and Cheung, contrary to Williamson, has been to emphasize these various obstacles to the ideal use of the price system.
“The main reason that makes it profitable to start a business could be that it is expensive to use the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of "organizing" production through the price mechanism is the discovery of relevant prices. This cost can be reduced, but not eliminated, by the emergence of specialized actors who sell this information." (The nature of the firm, p. 390)
This is also quoted by Steven Cheung in "The contractual nature of the firm", 1983. Coase notes (n. 4) that : "(…) the assumption that all individuals know all relevant prices is clearly not true in the real world."
In Coase's article, the problem of uncertainty (Frank Knight) is dominated by that of finding natural or essential prices (Adam Smith). The hypothetical situation in which all prices are 'essential' ("relevant prices") and therefore transaction costs are negligible, is a situation of independent producers and buyers, who have a good knowledge of the value and therefore product costs. It is the one that is described by Cheung from a situation, borrowed from Smith, in which all exchanges are strictly commercial: "Consider the classic example of the 'pin factory', in which each owner of the set of resources specializes in working on a single task. If all transaction costs were zero, the purchaser of a pin would make a separate payment to each of the many participants in its production." (The contractual nature of the firm, p. 4).
A transaction cost is the difference between the fictitious price of an infinitesimal productive service, the "essential price" (the effective price of which could be represented by a tip) and the effective price of a commodity. The more technical it is, the higher the transaction cost will be. A regime of low transaction costs is therefore low tech (cf. P. Bihouix), which does not imply a low level of wealth (low life): "If there were no measurement costs and performance evaluation, there would be no firms and the value of the social outputs would be maximum." (Cheung, 1983). The difference between the two prices is the 'social cost' of the organization of production or the 'added value' by it (in the sense of "mehrwert"), which are approximation values ('proxy values') : "all organization costs are transaction costs, and vice versa", S.N.S. Cheung, 'Economic organization and transaction costs', The New Palgrave, 1987, p. 56. Attachment, often pathological, to cooperation, to organizations, to exclusive property, to commodities and possibly to comfort... are the basic transaction costs (cf. 'fetishism').