About

Yoram Barzel received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1961. He specializes in price theory and economic organization. Professor Barzel has had a distinguished career, delivering keynote addresses at conferences and receiving notable awards such as The Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award. He has contributed significantly to the field of economics through his research and teaching, and he is recognized as a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. His work and influence extend across various aspects of political economy and economic organization.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Industrial organization
• Mathematics
• Microeconomics
• Law and economics
• Public economics
• Economics
• Business
• Economic system

Selected publications

• Economic Analysis of Property Rights

  2023 · 289 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Law and economics
  • Economics

  The standard neoclassical model of economics is incapable of explaining why one form of organization arises over another. It is a model where transaction costs are implicitly assumed to not exist; however, transaction costs are here defined as the costs of strengthening a given distribution of economic property rights, and they always exist. Economic Analysis of Property Rights is a study of how individuals organise resources to maximise the value of their economic rights over these resources. It offers a unified theoretical structure to deal with exchange, rights formation, and organisation that traditional economic theory often ignores. It explains how transaction costs can be reduced through reorganization and, in the end, how the distribution of property rights that exists is the one that maximizes wealth net of these transaction costs. This necessary hypothesis explains much of the puzzling organizations and institutions that exist now and have existed in the past.

  PublisherDOI

• Celebrating Fifty Years to Cheung's Theory of Share Tenancy

  Man and the Economy · 2018-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE FIRM

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-07-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Coase’s contribution to contract theory

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2016-02-24 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Coase’s contribution to contract theory

  Chapters · 2016-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Ronald H. Coase was one of the most innovative and provocative economists of the twentieth century. Besides his best known papers on ‘The Nature of the Firm’ and ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, he had a major role in the development of the field of law and economics, and made numerous influential contributions to topics including public utilities, regulation and the functioning of markets. In this comprehensive Companion, 31 leading economists, social scientists and legal scholars assess the impact of his work with particular reference to the research programs initiated, the influence on policymakers, and the challenge to conventional perspectives.

  Publisher

• Steve Cheung in Seattle, 1969–1982

  Man and the Economy · 2016-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Transaction Costs: Are They Just Costs?*

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2016-01-01 · 89 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  What are the main effects of the cost of transacting, and what distinguishes them from other costs? In this paper it is argued that when transaction costs are positive, people are able to gain at each other's expense. In order to minimize the associated loss, people will agree to restrain themselves in various ways, and will erect social institutions to impose and enforce the restraints. Such institutions have no significant function when transacting is costless. The model presented here is compared with a stylized, costless transaction, Walrasian model to bring out some of the unique features of positive costs of transacting. Even though the Walrasian model asssumes that the cost of transacting is zero, some practitioners use it to analyze transaction cost problems. For instance, the Pareto conditions as obtained from a zero transaction cost model are routinely used for the assessment of advertising. It is sufficient to observe that ignorance is a precondition for advertising, whereas the Walrasian model assumes full knowledge of exchanged products1. The division of labor is a major contributor to the maximization of the total value of the resources used. A result of specializing is that the producers of a good are distinct from its consumers. Resources are required then not only for producing goods (and for shipping them to consumers), but also for effecting exchange - identifying potential buyers, describing the good to them, setting the terms of trade, and transfering rights. In much of the theory of perfect competition, particularly as developed by Walras and his followers, it is assumed that homogeneous commodities are traded at a point in space. Moreover, buyers are assumed to be fully informed regarding the attributes of every unit of every good, and know the market clearing prices of various sellers2. All units of the same commodity must, then, be traded at a uniform price. As the costs of effecting exchange in this model are assumed to be zero, resources are needed for 'production'

  Publisher

• Structure and Performance: The Task of Economic History

  Journal of Economic Literature · 2016-01-01 · 186 citations

  article

  JHE CLIOMETRIC revolution in ecoknomic history wedded neoclassical economics and quantitative methods in order to describe and explain the performance of economies in the past.' Economic history gained in rigor and scientific pretension, but at the expense of exploring a much more fundamental set of questions about the evolving structure of economies that underlies performance.2 Cliometricians have turned their backs on a long tradition stretching back from Joseph Schumpeter to Karl Marx to Adam Smith. These scholars regarded economic history as essential because it added a dimension to economics. Its purpose was to analyze the parameters held constant by the economist. If economics is a theory of choice subject to specified constraints, a task of economic history was to theorize about those evolving constraints. The failure of economic historians to provide their colleagues with a historical dimension to their perspective has reduced the effectiveness of economists in dealing with contemporary problems. Failure of economists to appreciate the transitory character of the assumed constraints and to understand the source and direction of these changing constraints is a fundamental handicap to further development of economic theory. The challenge to the economic historian which has equally compelling implications for the economic theorist is to explain the transformation of the structure of the American Economy in the past century.3 In the rest of this essay I shall explore this issue in order to specify some of the dimensions of the economic historian's task.

  Publisher

• What are ‘property rights’, and why do they matter? A comment on Hodgson's article

  Journal of Institutional Economics · 2015-07-01 · 43 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This comment divides ‘property rights’ into ‘legal rights’ and ‘economic rights’ in order to distinguish between two very different concepts that are often confounded in the literature. Because of transaction costs, neither kind of rights is ever complete. These are useful in economic analysis as maximizing individuals constantly expand and shrink them. Unlike Hodgson’s, both notions of rights adopted here are positive, useful in analyzing behavior, and not normative as Hodgson (2015) claims them to be. As used by me, they do not devalue property rights as Hodgson claims.

  PublisherDOI

• The Evolution of Criminal Law and Police During the Pre-Modern Era

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2011-10-28 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Increased standardization was a by-product of technical innovations during the Industrial Revolution. An unfortunate side effect of standardization was enhanced opportunities for theft and embezzlement. Two significant modern institutions radically evolved during the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries to control these growing problems: criminal law and public police. These institutions strongly interacted with the pace of the Industrial Revolution. Our argument explains this evolution and is tested through an analysis of several historical facts: the role of early police, the fall of the watch system, the creation of improvement commissions, the removal of possession immunity, the rise and fall of factory colonies, and the fall and rise of court cases during the eighteenth century.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Edgar Kiser

  University of Washington

  7 shared

• Wing Suen

  7 shared

• Michel A. Habib

  5 shared

• Douglas W. Allen

  Simon Fraser University

  5 shared

• Levis A. Kochin

  3 shared

• D. Bruce Johnsen

  George Mason University

  3 shared

• Ben T. Yu

  3 shared

• Tim R. Sass

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Chicago

  1961

Awards & honors

• The Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award (2017)