The Answer Is 'Transactions Costs'

摘要

My first experience with Professor Douglass North was when as a Ph.D. candidate I saw his "job talk" at Washington University in St. Louis in 1982. Of course, it wasn't clear who was interviewing whom. I remember being unimpressed with the talk-no equations, some purely verbal story about the Neolithic Revolution and the problem of organizing human institutions. When I heard that North had accepted "our" offer to transpose "University" and "Washington" in his affiliation and move two thousand miles east to St. Louis, I was surprised at the celebration, bordering on rejoicing, I saw from the Wash U faculty.