Transaction Cost Economics: The Origins

This paper is an autobiographical recollection of how my interest in and work on transaction cost economics progressively developed. It begins with an overview of the transaction cost economics project. A sketch of my undergraduate and graduate education follows. Key events in the 1960s that set the stage for my 1971 paper on “The Vertical Integration of Production” are then described. This paper would turn out to be the entering wedge from which transaction cost economics would take shape and continues today, as set out in the closing pages of the article.