Integrating variable risk preferences, trust, and transaction cost economics – 25 years on: reflections in memory of Oliver Williamson

By J. McMackin, Todd H. Chiles, L. W. Lam. Journal of Institutional Economics, 2021

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this essay, we honour the memory of Oliver Williamson by reflecting on Chiles and McMackin's 1996 Academy of Management Review article ‘Integrating variable risk preferences, trust, and transaction cost economics’. The article, which built on Williamson's work in transaction cost economics (TCE), went on to attract attention not only from the authors’ home discipline of management and organisation studies, but also from other business disciplines, the professions and the social sciences. After revisiting the article's origins and core arguments, we turn to selectively (re)view TCE's development since 1996 through the lens of this article, focusing on trust, risk and subjective costs. We cover conceptual and empirical developments in each of these areas and reflect on how our review contributes to previous debates concerning trade-offs implicit in relaxing TCE's behavioural assumptions. We conclude by reflecting on key points of learning from our review and possible implications for future research.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a27ec82636cc9e28c60f9d6c448ff5c531c25173

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In General Decision Sciences

1. Mei‐Fang Chen
2. Cait Lamberton
3. Baojun Jiang

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Mark Houston
2. Mei‐Fang Chen
3. Georgios Zervas
4. Cait Lamberton
5. Baojun Jiang
6. Anna M. Costello

In Safety Research

1. Mei‐Fang Chen
2. Cait Lamberton
3. Baojun Jiang

Citations in the corpus

• Marketing in the Sharing Economy (2019, background): “Indeed, external regulation is mainly required under conditions in which a low degree of trust fosters opportunism among exchange partners (Chiles and McMackin 1996).”
• The impacts of the food traceability system and consumer involvement on consumers' purchase intentions toward fast foods (2013, background): “Whenever there is incomplete information in buyers or sellers (mostly buyers), there emerges uncertainty in buyers’ mind before making purchase decisions (Singh & Sirdeshmukh, 2000), and such uncertainty may lead to their subjective possibility of going to suffer a loss (Chiles & McMackin, 1996).”