This book grew out of my interest in organizational forms and institutional arrangements and their impact on economic outcomes. Price theory or microeconomics, in its conventional form, treats organizations and institutions the same way as it treats the law of gravity: These factors are implicitly assumed to exist but appear neither as independent nor as dependent variables in the models. Such economy in model making can be eminently reasonable. It enables us to isolate critical relationships and simplifies the use of mathematical tools in the analysis. However, unlike the law of gravity, organizations and institutions are not invariant; they vary with time and location, with political arrangements and structures of property rights, with technologies employed, and with physical qualities of resources, commodities, and services that are exchanged. In fact, production involves not only the physical transformation of inputs into outputs but also the transfer of property rights between the owners of resources, commodities, and labor services. In the transfer of rights, whether within firms or across markets, agents maximize their objective functions subject to the constraints of organizations and institutions.

Once our research questions involve variable organizations and institutions, either as exogenous or endogenous variables, conventional microeconomic analysis becomes a rather blunt instrument. Our traditional tools are not well suited for examining the nature of the firm, the variation in industrial organization, institutional change in economic history, the organization of exchange in formal markets and nonmarket settings, or comparative economic systems.