ABSTRACT
The main purpose of this monograph is to discover whether organizational-arrangements found in the offshore oil gathering business align with predictions derived from the transaction cost paradigm. The matching of predictions with arrangements is taken as being a satisfactory case study test of that paradigm. The main hypothesis is that transaction cost enconomizing explains choices that transactors make between institutional organizational-forms. In fact, two separate branches of transaction cost theory have been developed – the measurement cost and the rent appropriation (Williamson, 1985, and Alchian and Woodward, 1988) – and both are needed to explain the complex institutional-arrangements found in offshore oil gathering.
