Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,041

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

A Transaction Cost Approach to Make-or-Buy Decisions

Walker, Gordon, Weber, David·1984·Administrative Science Quarterly
DOI 10.2307/2393030
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Gordon Walker and David Weber This study focuses on make-or-buy decisions as a paradigmatic problem for analyzing transaction costs. Hypotheses developed from Williamson's efficient boundaries framework were tested in a multiple-indicator structural equation model. The influence of transaction costs on decisions to make or buy components was assessed indirectly through the effects of supplier market competition and two types of uncertainty, volume and technological. In addition to transaction costs, the decisions were hypothesized to be predicted by both buyer production experience and the comparative production costs between buyer and supplier. The hypotheses were tested on a sample of make-or-buy decisions made in a division of a U.S. automobile company. The results show that comparative production costs are the strongest predictor of makeor-buy decisions and that both volume uncertainty and supplier market competition have small but significant effects. The findings are explained in terms of the complexity of the components and the potential pattern of communication and influence among managers responsible for making the decisions.*

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 · 10.2307/2393030

Cites

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

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Walker, G., & Weber, D.
Venue
Administrative Science Quarterly
Publisher
JSTOR
Published
1984-09
Volume
29
Issue
3
Pages
373
ISSN
0001-8392 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2307/2393030
OpenAlex
W2169145979
Cited by
1,041
References
0
FWCI
10.94
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

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.