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Deals that start when you sign them

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2021

Robert Gibbons Open the ORCID record for Robert Gibbons [Opens in a new window]
Robert Gibbons*
Affiliation:
MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: rgibbons@mit.edu
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Abstract

This essay explores six sentences from Oliver Williamson – five providing context and the sixth the central topic. Decades ago, Williamson asserted that: (a) ‘substantially the same factors’ (1973: 316) create governance issues not only within organizations but also in interactions between organizations; and (b) relational contracting might be useful in addressing these issues in both domains (1979, Figure II). More recently – in an informal conversation in 2002 – he suggested a perspective on relational contracting that appears valuable in both of these domains: relational contracts as ‘deals that start when you sign them’. The bulk of this essay explores past, present, and potential research on this perspective.

Keywords

Clarity problemrelational contractWilliamson
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 269 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Millennium Economics Ltd.

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