Williamson, Oliver Eaton (1932-2020), an American economist, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economic sciences. He shared the award with Elinor Ostrom, another American economist, for their work on economic governance. Such governance concerns the use of authority to manage public resources and economic problems.
Williamson’s research focused on the ways in which organizations and markets solve problems. One area of his work involved the study of how a business firm resolves conflicts within the company itself. Williamson also examined decision-making processes within businesses. In particular, he studied the “boundaries of the firm.” For example, he analyzed business decisions involving how a firm should go about acquiring a product it needs. Williamson looked at whether the firm would make the product itself or contract with another firm to have it make the product instead.
Williamson was born in Superior, Wisconsin, on Sept. 27, 1932. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in business from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. He received a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University in 1960, and a Ph.D. degree from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1963. Williamson taught business, economics, and law at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1963 to 1965; at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1983; and at Yale University from 1983 to 1988. He then returned to Berkeley to teach at the university’s Haas School of Business. Williamson died on May 21, 2020.
