Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 784

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 28 of the 28 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Public and private bureaucracies: a transaction cost economics perspectives

Williamson, O.·1999·Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization
DOI 10.1093/jleo/15.1.306
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The public bureaucracy is a puzzle. How is it that an organizational form that is so widely used is also believed to be inefficient - both in relation to a hypothetical ideal and in comparison with private bureaucracies? This article examines public bureaucracy through the lens of transaction cost economics, according to which the public bureaucracy, like other alternative modes of governance, is well suited to some transactions and poorly suited to others. Rather than proceed in a completely general way, I focus on what James Q. Wilson describes as 'sovereign transactions', of which foreign affairs is an example. I ask what it is that distinguishes sovereign transactions, after which I compare the efficacy of public and private bureaucracies for managing such transactions. I conclude that there is an efficiency place for public bureaucracy, but that all modes of governance (markets, hybrids, firms, regulation), of which public bureaucracy is one, need to be kept in their place. I further observe that public bureaucracies are not all of a kind and that differences between them need to be distinguished.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/jleo/15.1.306

Cites

28 of 28 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 28 references

Cited by

See all 784

Metadata

Authors
Williamson, O.
Venue
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
1999-03-01
Volume
15
Issue
1
Pages
306-342
ISSN
1465-7341 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1093/jleo/15.1.306
OpenAlex
W2094357075
Cited by
784
References
28
FWCI
20.92
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Public and private bureaucracies: a transaction cost economics perspectives. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/jleo/15.1.306
The paper
Williamson, O. (1999). Public and private bureaucracies: a transaction cost economics perspectives. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/15.1.306

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.