25 mei 2010
Prof. Elinor Ostrom and Prof. Oliver Williamson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009 for their path breaking work on governance, i.e. the political and economic institutions that frame the expectations, decision rights and property rights in economic transactions.
Margot Weijnen, scientific director of NGInfra, gave the Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson a warm welcoming word.
Transaction cost theory of Oliver Williamson builds on bounded rational behavior of actors and the necessity to take opportunistic behavior of third parties into account. Opportunities for contracting strongly depend on the characteristics of transactions that need to be facilitated. For instance market based classical contracting is only efficient under specific circumstances, including little transaction specific investments and a low degree of uncertainty. Depending on these circumstances, Williamson work provides very powerful insights into the efficiency of different kinds of economic organization, ranging from traditional contraction to hybrid modes like PPP, towards hierarchical organizations like private enterprises. Obviously, efficiency and bounded rational behavior are very important keywords in Williamsons work.
And also Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom received some welcoming words of Margot Weijnen. And who knowes.. maybe they even discussed a cooperation in the future?
Ostrom is also concerned with governance but takes a quite different perspective. Her work is very much concerned with so-called Common Pool Resources. This governance issue is very closely related to the well-known tragedy of the commons, i.e. a situation in which everybody can make use of an important resource and appropriate the benefits without contributing to its long-term sustainability. This phenomenon is quite recognized with respect to the exploitation of environmental resources like forests, rivers or lake systems. Traditional tools of economic regulation, like price signals, direct governmental intervention, or privatization, often proved not to be suitable to resolve these problems. Ostrom demonstrated the importance of self-regulation with respect to these Common Pool Resources, which success or failure strongly depends on the local conditions and the socio-economic attributes of users. Efficiency is not a key issue here, but rather the interrelation between socio-economic characteristics of the users vis-à-vis the features of the environmental resource systems.
In the 13th conference these two approaches were applied with respect to the regulation of next generation infrastructures. Infrastructures are large-scale systems that are open to the public in order to provide essential services, like energy, communication, transportation or drinking water. Traditionally these services are provided under strict governmental supervision and regulation that should provide sufficient guarantees to maintain the economic and technical sustainability of these network industries. However, since the past two or three decades some very fundamental changes occurred that challenge the traditional approach of the governance of infrastructures.
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The presentations of the meeting are also online now >>>
