MINISTRY OF EDUCATION OF THE RF

KEMEROVSK STATE UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ECONOMICS

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC THEORY

COURSE WORK

On the topic “Transaction costs and their impact on the functioning of the market”

Coursework Coursework

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Kemerovo, 2007

PLAN

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………pp.3-4

Chapter 1. Transaction costs as a special type of cost in production and consumption………………………………………………………………………………...page 5

1.1. The essence of transaction costs…………………………..pp.5-7

1.2. Types of transaction costs……………………………..pp. 7-15

Chapter 2. Features of the economic system of the Russian Federation………………..page 16

2.1. The concept of “transition economy”, distinctive features and patterns………………………………………………………………..p.16-18

2.2. Features of the transition economy in Russia, its main tasks and ways to solve them…………………………………………………………….....p.18-24

2.3. Transaction costs in a transition economy………….pp.24-33

Chapter 3. Transaction costs and their impact on the functioning of the market…………………………………………………………………………………..p.34

3.1. Transaction costs as a barrier to entry into the market for small businesses……………………………………………………………....pp.34-44

3.2. Transaction costs of overcoming administrative barriers – economic losses of society……………………………………pp.44-52

3.3. Transaction costs at the micro level – low rates of individual savings………………………………………………………...pp.52-60

Conclusion…………………………………………………………….....pp.61-63

List of used literature…………………………………...pp.64-65

Introduction

During the transition to a market economy, the role of institutional changes was underestimated. Accelerated privatization, not complemented by a policy of targeted formation of economic institutions, could not overcome the incentives and stereotypes of non-market behavior, and could not create an effective management system. As a result, an inefficient structure of the Russian market emerged, inter-industry connections were destroyed, and industry proportions were deformed.

Inefficient market structure is closely associated with high transaction costs. They make up a significant share of the gross domestic product, while a large role is played by various intermediary structures that do not perform their function quite effectively, thereby slowing down the process of economic growth and directing it along an extensive path of development.

Transaction costs are the reason for the formation of ineffective socio-economic institutions, a source of deformation, monopolization of the market structure, and also impede the formation of a developed capital market, which becomes a factor in the conservation of an inefficient industry structure with a predominance of low-level industries, weak development of small and medium-sized businesses, and lack of incentives for innovation and investment.

Reducing transaction costs and changing their structure is a necessary condition for the formation of a flexible and balanced market structure, focused on scientific and technological progress, rational use of limited resources, and sustainable growth. Therefore, it seems relevant to identify the mechanism of the relationship
transaction costs and market structure, analyze the effectiveness of the formed socio-economic institutions.

The concept of transaction costs is developed by the institutional direction of modern economic theory. Significant contributions to it were made by R. Coase, M. Olson, A. Alchyan, O. Williamson, D. North, S. Winter, J. Hodgson, K. Polanyi, H. Demsetz, T. Eggertson and others. From domestic scientists Those who are actively and fruitfully developing this area include R. Kapelyushnikov, V. Kokorev, S. Malakhov, A. Nesterenko, A. Oleynik, V. Polterovich, V. Radaev, A. Shastitko, G. Yavlinsky and others.

However, in general, this area is one of the least developed. There is no clear theoretical interpretation of the concept of transaction costs. The structure and dynamics of transaction costs on the Russian market have not been studied, and the methodology for their assessment and measurement is insufficiently developed. The direction and degree of their impact on the institutional environment and the structure of markets have also not been studied. The place and role of transaction cost theory among other economic disciplines remains the subject of fascinating and fruitful debate. The insufficient level of development and undoubted practical significance determined the topic of this work.

The purpose of this work is to identify the economic and social foundations of the formation of transaction costs in a market economy, as well as to theoretically study the mechanism and results of the impact of transaction costs on the institutional environment and market structure. The stated goal determined the following research objectives:

Analyze the classification of transaction costs;

Conduct a theoretical analysis of the processes of interaction between transaction costs, institutional structure and market structure;

Consider the main problems in the transition economy of Russia related to transaction costs.

Chapter 1. Transaction costs as a special type of costs in production and consumption

1.1. The essence of transaction costs

The company spends considerable resources and efforts to assess the parameters of goods that are significant to it, control partners and enforce agreements. Sureties, guarantees, trademarks, sorting and classification costs, timekeeping, hiring of agents, arbitration, payment of intermediaries, and costly legal processes all reflect the pervasive nature of transaction costs in an economic system.

The discovery of the true meaning of the phenomenon of transaction costs, made in 1937 by the American economist R. Coase, changed scientists’ understanding of the market economy and predetermined the direction of the subsequent development of economic science, largely turning it towards practice.

Transaction costs are understood as the costs of interaction between economic entities. This type of cost includes any necessary expenditure of resources that are not directly aimed at the production of economic goods, but ensure the successful implementation of this process.

Moreover, the category of transaction costs is broader than just a type of firm’s costs. Many transaction costs appear not at the firm level, but at the level of society as a whole. What other than the costs of interaction between economic entities are, for example, the costs of the state for the maintenance of arbitration courts resolving economic disputes. Transaction costs are a whole layer of economic life that is found everywhere and determines the essence and forms of many processes.

Where do transaction costs come from? This question cannot be answered in monosyllables. The first most important source is the cost of acquiring information. Any information that subjects require in the process of production, exchange and consumption is obtained at the cost of certain efforts.

When we act as a consumer, we are interested in the presence and degree of manifestation of valuable properties contained in a given good, as well as information about prices in the market for this product and in the markets for substitute goods. The cost of searching for relevant information will be measured mainly in time spent.

The most valuable information for a manufacturer includes data on the presence and magnitude of demand, consumer tastes, modern technologies, and the behavior of competitors. Obtaining this information is mainly related to the remuneration of the company’s employees, as well as the remuneration of intermediaries, payment for consultants’ services, etc.

The second source of transaction costs is the selfishness of economic subjects or opportunism, i.e. the tendency of people to behave selfishly to the detriment of others. Opportunism manifests itself in concealment of information, its deliberate distortion, deception, avoidance of work, and fraud.

Moreover, it is quite difficult to unravel the bad intentions of partners. The world is structured in such a way that information is distributed unevenly, and a manager cannot easily obtain all the data that his counterparty uses.

Third: the analytical capabilities of economic entities are not limitless. People and firms are limitedly rational. This means that the subject does not choose the objectively optimal solution for himself, but only the best of those that he could find. The fact is that a manager, like a consumer, cannot instantly analyze all the data and make the optimal decision.

The existence of transaction costs is thus predetermined by a group of subjective factors. Objective factors greatly enhance this effect due to:

A constant increase in the number of transactions (as a result of the development of specialization and division of labor);

General uncertainty characteristic of the economy (it is difficult to plan anything in an environment that is dynamically changing under the influence of many factors);

The presence of transaction costs at the national level.

1.2. Types of transaction costs

To complete a transaction, an agent may be required to perform many different operations. Each of them can be very expensive and be accompanied by errors and losses. Hence the variety of types of transaction costs. There are a number of approaches to the classification of transaction costs.

1. Transaction costs accompany both production and consumption. Goods and services, as D. North emphasizes, have many properties, the degree of manifestation of which varies from one instance to another. Assessing the manifestation of the desired properties is fraught with costs. As a result, subjects are forced to expend effort not only in the process of production activities, but also in the process of consumption. Accordingly, it is legitimate to divide transaction costs into consumer transaction costs and production transaction costs.

It is appropriate to recall here that not only individuals, but also companies act as consumers. Therefore, each firm directly bears both of these types of costs. For example, incoming quality control of raw materials can be classified as consumer costs, and advertising can be classified as production transaction costs.

2. Further, a firm's transaction costs can be fixed or variable. Variables include costs that grow with an increase in the number of transactions: costs of control, decision-making, as well as costs associated with negotiations and information search, etc. Constants do not depend on the volume of transactions and consist primarily of the costs of creating and maintaining transaction management structures: these are the costs of organizing new departments within the company or registering and “launching” “subsidiaries” for the development of new business, etc.

At the macro level, an example of constant transaction costs can be the costs of transferring the economy to “market tracks”. Society must incur enormous costs in terms of creating legislation, law enforcement, business customs, and unwritten rules to ensure that any transaction proceeds within certain limits. Sometimes in this sense they talk about the existence of transaction capital used to finance transaction costs. It consists of fixed (investment transaction) and working capital. The first is necessary to create free markets, firms, and political structures. The second is to finance the day-to-day costs that arise in the operation of markets and the political system.

3. Regarding the moment of concluding a contract, a distinction is made between costs preceding the transaction (exante) and those arising during the transaction (ex post). The first include the costs of finding a partner, drafting a contract, conducting negotiations and providing guarantees for the implementation of the agreement. The latter are associated with the imperfection of the dispute resolution mechanism and occur in several forms. Firstly, these are the costs of adapting the contract to unforeseen events, secondly, the costs of litigation or private settlement of disputes in the event of its failure, thirdly, all other costs associated with ensuring the interests of the company in the course of fulfilling contractual obligations .

The main difference between ex ante and ex post costs is that ex ante costs are planned in advance and represent an acceptable cost of interaction for the parties, while ex post costs often arise unforeseen. These losses of the parties that are not taken into account in the price sometimes put the business at risk of failure.

4. A special place in the classification of transaction costs is occupied by costs associated with specific assets and agency relationships.

Indeed, a certain part of capital takes the form of specific assets. They differ in that they are needed specifically in a given transaction or in a transaction with a specific partner (unique equipment that has no alternative use, special skills of workers, etc.). While they have higher productivity than general purpose assets, they also pose increased risk to their owner. After all, if the contract is canceled, they cannot be used for other purposes or sold at real value.

The specificity of assets, in turn, leads to the emergence of transaction costs. Since a company has acquired something that cannot be sold at a “normal” price, it is forced to “protect” its specific asset. More specifically, it tries to bind partners with a long-term contract, collateral, guarantees, and they, naturally, agree to such restrictions on their freedom for free. These are additional transaction costs that arise for both parties who have entered into a transaction involving specific assets.

5. Agency relationships arise when one party (agent) acts on behalf and on behalf of another (principal). In this case, the agent can sometimes ignore the interests of his principal. There are many examples of such behavior: “shirking” from conscientiously performing duties, concealing information, abuse of authority, etc.

The principal, knowing about the theoretical possibility of dishonest behavior by an employee, will try to limit his freedom of action. The most proven method is to organize, at a certain cost, a system of control and coercion of the hired agent. The latter, for his part, may consider it profitable to incur certain costs in order to convince the principal of the impeccability of his intentions. For example, voluntarily freeze part of his own fee as a security deposit, which will be returned to him only if the principal recognizes the work performed in good faith. The result of this is the so-called residual losses, i.e. costs of deviation of an agent's business behavior from optimal. Thus, agency costs are the sum:

Residual losses;

Control costs on the part of the principal;

Costs of providing guarantees on the part of the agent.

6. Finally, depending on the mechanism of origin of transaction costs, they are distinguished:

Internal (managerial);

External (market);

Political (costs of the political market).

External costs. Describing market costs, R. Coase noted that they stem from the need to find out who can make a deal with, approach the counterparty with your proposals, negotiate, draw up a contract, make sure that its terms are acceptable, etc.

Reasons for the emergence of market costs: on the one hand, the market is characterized by a state of uncertainty. Subjects are not fully informed and have to figure out who can buy or sell a particular product and under what conditions. On the other hand, many market transactions are not impersonal. If the parties decide to enter into a transaction, they need to learn more about each other and assess, as far as possible, the counterparty’s ability to successfully fulfill its obligations. Negotiations (sometimes with the participation of lawyers) are necessary to develop acceptable contract terms. In addition, monitoring measures are required throughout the entire transaction, and in the event of attempts by a partner to evade fulfillment of its obligations, actions must be taken to force it (within the framework of the current “rules of the game”) to comply with previously accepted conditions.

Market costs can be classified more strictly as follows:

1) costs of preparing the contract (search for information);

2) costs of persuading a partner to complete a transaction (advertising, sales promotion, etc.);

3) costs of concluding a contract (negotiations and acceptance

decisions);

4) costs of monitoring the execution of the transaction and defending

their interests.

Let's look at each of these types of costs.

Costs of searching for information. A subject who wants to make a deal is forced to search for a partner, and this search necessarily causes costs. In general, there are four groups of costs associated with information and its search:

1) the costs of searching for information about prices and preferences of suppliers and buyers of a particular product;

2) costs associated with communication between the parties (postal, courier, telephone costs, rental of meeting rooms, etc.);

3) costs for testing and quality control;

4) costs of recruiting qualified personnel.

The first item of expenditure deserves special attention. Finding information about suppliers and clients is one of the significant problems of a modern company. For example, if a manager is going to promote a new product to the market, he needs to understand what exactly the buyer wants from this product (which properties of the product are most important to him). There may be several possible answers: most products have a lot of quality parameters, among which there are probably decisive ones. In addition, the simplicity and speed of purchase, level of service, consistency of quality and much more are important. In order to find out which criteria have the greatest influence on a buyer's choice of a product, special marketing research may be required, including interviews with potential customers and other methods. After this, a hypothesis is put forward, tested, and a decision is made.

Such work, as a rule, is ordered by companies from specialized marketing agencies and is not cheap.

Costs of convincing a partner. The costs of convincing a partner to complete a transaction are caused by the demand-limited nature of a market economy. Effective demand is the only “intra-system” deficit, an integral property of the market with which the company has to deal. Therefore, it is not enough to find the optimal partner. It is necessary that he conclude a deal with your company.

The main costs associated with this consist of: 1) sales promotion, 2) advertising, 3) public relations system.

A sales promotion offers the buyer some material benefit from the transaction. Advertising seeks to persuade a partner to complete a transaction by offering him indirect benefits. Finally, good public relations is not aimed directly at increasing sales, but at improving overall consumer attitudes towards the company and its products. That is, they create a favorable climate or background for making a transaction.

Costs of negotiations and decision making. Negotiation and decision-making costs arise when the essence of the transaction is approximately clear and the parties bargain, trying to get the most favorable conditions for themselves and protect themselves from surprises. These costs constitute a significant expense item, if only because negotiations and decision-making are the functions of the company's highest paid employees. Working time, which they spend mainly in meetings and conferences, is the main direct item within this cost category.

Costs of control and coercion. Having a signed contract with a partner does not guarantee automatic fulfillment of obligations under this contract. Regardless of who the counterparty to the transaction is, the company must monitor compliance with deadlines, compliance with quality parameters, supply volumes, etc. All these activities are carried out at the expense of the company by its employees or invited specialists. In any case, control and coercion are an integral and very important part of business.

An example is the control over taxpayers by the state. To check the correctness of tax calculations, timeliness and completeness of their payment, the state has to maintain a solid apparatus consisting of experts (tax workers) and “siloviks” (tax police). The funds allocated for the operation of these services are very significant. Nevertheless, the expenses pay off, since the desire of economic entities to pay taxes decreases with the tightening of control procedures.

Internal costs. Internal (managerial) transaction costs are associated with intra-company transactions. Most of them arise during the implementation of labor contracts concluded by the company. Management costs in this case will be expressed as follows:

1 . In pacxods for building, maintaining and improving the organizational structure of the company. These expenses are associated with a whole range of operations: personnel management, investments in information technology, PR, lobbying. Typically these are fixed transaction costs.

2. In the costs of current management of the company. These are usually variable transaction costs. Two subgroups of such costs can be distinguished:

a) information costs - company costs associated with decision-making, monitoring and control of the execution of orders, checking the fulfillment of official duties of employees, agency costs, information processing costs, etc.;

b) costs associated with the physical movement of goods and components along technological chains. An example would be intra-company overhead costs: transportation and other costs associated with the movement of unfinished products.

Political transaction costs. Market rules of the game are not created in a vacuum. On the contrary, they are based on a specific political platform that is compatible with the capitalist market and capable of supporting its operation. The creation and operation of this structure, as well as the public goods it reproduces, require costs. Their nature is similar to the nature of managerial transaction costs, but they manifest themselves not within the company, but at the level of the entire country: to some extent, they can be considered agency costs, i.e. at the cost of interaction between the principal and the agent.

Political transaction costs, in particular, include the following:

1. Costs of creating and maintaining power structures. They include the costs of creating a legal system, executive and police apparatus, courts, etc. In addition to them, this includes such important elements of the political superstructure as parties, social movements and lobbying structures that are directly involved in the political game.

2. Current costs of the political system. This category includes expenses associated with the government’s fulfillment of its obligations to society: protecting the legal rights of economic entities, ensuring national security, performing arbitration functions, maintaining public education, healthcare, etc. Similar to the private sector, the state, when performing its functions, faces the costs of searching for information , making decisions, issuing orders, monitoring their execution. Finally, the costs of negotiation and compromise between different groups of the population, as well as between them and the government, cannot be ignored.

Contrary to its name, political transaction costs are not only necessary from a political point of view. Even in developed democratic societies, when interacting between economic entities, forms of behavior such as deception and fraud remain beneficial, so a “third force” that performs the functions of an independent arbiter and policeman is very important. The market today cannot exist in isolation from the political system; accordingly, the costs that are caused by its operation inevitably fall on the economy.

Let us pay attention to the alternative nature of different types of transaction costs. An entrepreneur can choose a completely legal scheme for doing business, use all government mechanisms for protecting his property rights and at the same time bear all the burdens of financing political costs (mainly in the form of taxes). Or maybe choose a gray or completely black scheme, not incur political costs, but also protect your property exclusively on your own.

Chapter 2. Features of the economic system of the Russian Federation

2.1. The concept of “transition economy”, distinctive features and patterns

The Russian economy today is characterized as a transition economy, which determines the characteristics of the development of our country. To identify the distinctive features of a transition economy in Russia, its main problems and ways to solve them, we first define the general concept of such an economy.

A transitional economy is an economy in which the most important thing, unlike any “become” mature economy, is not the simple functioning of existing connections and elements, but the “withering away” of old ones and the formation of new connections and elements. A transition economy characterizes an intermediate state of society, when the previous system of socio-economic relations and institutions is destroyed and reformed, and a new one is just being formed. The changes taking place in a transition economy are predominantly changes in development, rather than in functioning, as is typical for the existing system.

A transition economy is a mixture of elements (relations, connections, institutions) of centralized and modern market systems. Elements of a market economy of free competition and a traditional economic system are sometimes added here.

By its nature, this is a special state in the evolution of the economy, when it functions precisely during the period of transition of society from one historical stage to another, in a turning point, an era of economic, political and social transformations. Hence the special nature of the transition economy, which distinguishes it from the “ordinary” economy of one or another stage, and the specific patterns of its functioning, among which two most important ones can be distinguished:

· inertia of the reproductive process;

· intensive development of all new forms, elements, institutions.

The first regularity (feature) of the functioning of a transition economy is associated with the continuity (inertia) of the reproduction process, which excludes the possibility of quickly replacing existing economic forms with other, desirable ones. Such actions would inevitably bring chaos to the production process. It is the inertia of reproduction that presupposes such a feature of the functioning of a transition economy as the preservation of old economic forms and relations for a sufficiently long period.

Another regularity (feature) of the functioning of a transition economy is the intensive development of all new forms and relationships. Understanding the irreversibility of the evolutionary process, as well as its main trends, makes it possible to accelerate it through the implementation of one or another reform program. The role of the subjective factor, on which the correct choice of directions and paths of development, and its practical implementation depends, is sharply increasing. The success of accelerating transition processes is ensured if reforms are planned not arbitrarily, but on the basis of knowledge of the laws of evolution and the construction of a system of actions in appropriate directions.

Main features of a transition economy:

· firstly, variability, instability, which do not just temporarily disrupt the stability of the system so that it then returns to an equilibrium state, but weaken it. It is gradually giving way to another economic system. This instability, the instability of the state of the transition economy determines, on the one hand, the special dynamism of its development and the corresponding nature of changes - irreversibility, non-repetition, and on the other - the growth of uncertainty in the development of the transition economy, options for the formation of a new system;

· secondly, the emergence and functioning of special transitional economic forms, i.e. a mixture of old and new. Transitional forms indicate, on the one hand, the existence of a transition economy, on the other hand, they indicate the direction of this transition and are a sign of its irreversibility;

· thirdly, the alternative nature of the development of the transition economy, which really means the possibility of multivariate economic development and the choice of the most favorable development option;

· fourthly, the special nature of contradictions in a transition economy. These are contradictions not of functioning, but of development, i.e. new and old, contradictions between different layers of society behind certain subjects of economic relations. The changes that the transition era is aimed at always have a revolutionary character in the economic aspect: we are talking about a change in economic systems. But also in socio-economic terms, transitional eras are often accompanied by such a sharp aggravation of contradictions that they are associated with revolutions and socio-political upheavals;

· fifthly, the historicity of the transition economy, which is associated with two circumstances. First of all, the very conditions of a transition economy are historical in nature; In addition, the historicity of the transition economy depends on the characteristics of the region, as well as on the individual country, which means that even the known patterns common to the transition economy manifest themselves differently in different conditions.

All these features must be taken into account when developing programs for reforming the economic system during the transition period.

2.2. Features of the transition economy in Russia, its main tasks and ways to solve them

The main distinguishing feature of the transition period of the Russian Federation is the historical unprecedented nature of the transition, which acts as a transition to a modern market economy not from a traditional one, but from a special one that existed in a relatively small number of planned economies. The “socialism” of the planned economy is the defining characteristic of the initial state of modern transition processes in Russian society. The socialist system of values ​​and orientation that has been formed over decades continues to manifest itself in the action of not only economic factors (determining the difficulties and uniqueness of economic reform), but also non-economic ones, which are especially important in transition states.
Russia is a pioneer and must solve problems unknown to this point in time. The uniqueness of Russia's problems means that solutions cannot rely on any “specific models” developed for transition processes.

In addition, Russian society today, on the path of reformist development, must carry out a “return” movement towards the effective use of market relations with all their attributes, a variety of forms of ownership, the development of entrepreneurial activity, etc.

The transition process in Russia is taking place in special historical conditions - the conditions of unfolding global transition processes.
Global transition processes in the world cannot but influence the Russian economy, the content of transition processes, and their final guidelines. In this sense, the transitional Russian economy is an interweaving of unique local and certain universal trends. Creating a new type of economic system that overcomes the shortcomings of the previous one and ensures increased economic efficiency is a rather complex process. The complexity is due not only to the enormity of the tasks of reforming the existing economic system, but also to the need to simultaneously overcome crisis phenomena that have worsened as a result of society's entry into a transition economy. In this regard, the main tasks of Russia's transition economy are as follows:

1. Economic liberalization is a system of measures aimed at the abolition or sharp reduction of prohibitions and restrictions, as well as state control in all spheres of economic life.

2. Demonopolization of the economy and the creation of a competitive environment, involving the creation of equal opportunities and conditions for business activity of all economic agents (ensuring access to the market for foreign competitors, encouraging small businesses and reducing barriers to entry into the industry, etc.).

3. Structural transformations aimed primarily at eliminating or mitigating imbalances inherited from the previous system in the sectoral structure of the national economy and its individual sectors.

4. Macroeconomic stabilization (mainly financial), which requires suppressing inflation, limiting money emissions, minimizing the state budget, etc.

5. Formation of a strong system of social protection of the population, which is aimed at the transition to targeted social support for the most needy segments of the population and should facilitate part of the population to adapt to the conditions of a market economy.

6. Institutional transformations, including changes in property relations (creation of the private sector), the formation of a market infrastructure, the creation of a new system of state regulation of the economy, the adoption of economic legislation adequate to market conditions.

In modern Russia, grandiose social experiments in institutional transformations are being carried out. Their cause was the deformation of the institutional structure, caused by the activities of socio-political forces that did not have an adequate theory of the dynamic development of the country.

The content of the deformation of the Soviet period was a violation of the institutional balance, that is, the optimal ratio of basic and complementary institutions. The institutions of the X-matrix were totally dominant - the redistributive economic complex, unitarism in politics and the dominance of communitarian values ​​in ideology that suppressed individual values. This meant that the use of the objectively necessary principle of matrix replication, that is, the completion of the institutional structure of society with complementary institutions of the U-matrix (a combination of economic institutions of the market, political institutions of the federation and subsidiary values, which enshrines the priority of I over we), was artificially restrained and blocked. But the laws of institutional self-organization cannot be abolished, and therefore the alternative elements that inevitably emerged under these conditions were latent, illegal, or monstrous in nature. These were exchange relations in the “black” and “gray” markets, separate activities of local authorities, which actually separated the economic and political life of entire regions from the life of the country, dissident movements to protect human rights in the ideological sphere, etc. In other words, politics during this period blocked the mechanism of self-assembly of an institutional structure with equally necessary basic and complementary elements. Such a social organism could not be viable, which manifested itself in a deep systemic crisis.

The beginning of market reforms in the 1990s was also characterized by the lack of adequate theoretical concepts among the socio-political forces that carried them out. The political economy of socialism went bankrupt; there were no other convincing domestic developments. Therefore, theories borrowed from Western countries, characterized by the dominance of the Y-matrix, were adopted. The fairly high level of their socio-economic development served as the main argument in favor of the concepts developed by scientists in these countries, and by practitioners - specific measures. But the fact that these theories reflected the peculiarities of the institutional development of the countries where they were created was not taken into account. Therefore, the theoretical basis for the transformations carried out in Russia were concepts that consolidated the dominant position of the U-matrix institutions in the social structure. The goal of the reforms was the formation of a market, the introduction of federal principles of political structure, as well as ensuring human rights and other personal values ​​in the ideological sphere. It was assumed - and actively carried out - to replace the basic X-matrix with a complementary Y-matrix.

In such an environment, the X-matrix inevitably occupies a leading position, since it is its institutions that more reliably ensure the reproduction and development of society as a whole, rather than individual social groups. Therefore, in the process of reform, borrowed elements were partially rejected as inadequate and socially unacceptable, and partially modified during implementation and integrated into public life in such a way that they often served opposite purposes compared to those for which they were originally borrowed. As evidence, let us consider two processes that are significant for modern Russian society - administrative reform and the transformation plan of RAO United Energy Systems of Russia (RAO UES).

It is known that the most important declared goals of administrative reform were the decentralization of management and the implementation of the principle of separation of powers. As it was implemented, its objectively necessary meaning became more and more obvious - the creation of a control system that was adequate in principles, complexity and structure to the controlled system. And it was this meaning, and not declarative goals, that began to determine the course of the reform and the set of specific measures. Thus, unexpectedly for adherents of the liberal course, federal districts arose, to which part of the powers of the federal center, primarily the executive branch, was delegated. The new structure of federal executive authorities, introduced by decree of the President of the Russian Federation of March 9, 2004 and adjusted by his decree of May 20, 2004, also modified the original plan. Firstly, it retained the sectoral management principle. Secondly, the vertical subordination of the structures introduced by decrees remained. Services and agencies are under the jurisdiction of ministries (or directly subordinate to the president or government of the Russian Federation), while in countries with a U-matrix they are elements of civil society, that is, for the most part they have an independent status. Thirdly, the practice of appointing (control from above) all heads of federal executive districts has become stronger. At the same time, this reform made it possible to make the work of all designated structures more transparent and controllable, since the rights and responsibilities of the elements of the new structure were clearly defined. Ministries are considered to be law-making bodies, since they have the authority to prepare bills and issue regulations, and the tasks of agencies and services are to carry out decisions of ministries and carry out special supervisory functions. Thus, administrative reform, in essence, strengthens the power vertical, promotes a clearer distribution of functions, rights and responsibilities between levels of hierarchical management and generally strengthens the economic-political institutional complex inherent in the X-matrix.

If you carefully analyze the progress of reform of RAO UES, you can also discover interesting trends. As is known, the company's management is actively pursuing corporatization and privatization of the energy complex and the formation of a free electricity market. They are offered a number of measures to create new holding structures and divisions within RAO. But the seemingly complex and bizarre pattern of company reform contains an obvious pattern. Firstly, the hierarchical vertical of the energy sector, opened during the “first privatization,” is being recreated (through the system of parent companies and share ownership structure). Secondly, as in the process of administrative reform, activities are separated with clear powers and responsibilities within the same hierarchical structure. Finally, thirdly, during the reform, a search is being made for an effective balance of market redistributive institutions. On the one hand, there are areas where state property and its inherent mechanism of centralized economy are preserved - this is mainly the energy grid complex. On the other hand, the sphere of dominance of market institutions and private business entities is determined - generating companies, that is, energy producers, will presumably be included in it.

These two examples show how ongoing transformations modernize institutional forms, but evolutionarily continue the trajectory of the country's development with the dominance of X-matrix institutions. The institutions of the Y-matrix are integrated into the Russian system as necessary and conducive to its dynamic development, but their action is increasingly mediated, determined, and limited by the action of the institutions of the basic X-matrix of the Russian state.

Thus, the evolutionary modernization of the modern transition economy of Russia means the development of its inherent institutional order. Such modernization assumes that practice has found new forms of expression for the economic mechanisms characteristic of the institutional X-matrix of the Russian state. Redistribution institutions maintain and strengthen their leading position, while they are “fertilized” by the practice of market reform. Market elements complement the Russian redistribution economy. Firstly, they are integrated into the structure of new institutional forms (for example, large monopolies in the form of joint-stock companies with dominant state participation). Secondly, commercial structures compensate for “redistribution failures” by acting alongside or instead of traditional government agencies. We are talking primarily about the areas of trade, catering, repair and maintenance, etc.

2.3. Transaction costs in a transition economy

According to a number of experts, the problems of the Russian economy are largely related to high transaction costs. The Russian economy has already reached a point where “transaction servicing consumes enormous resources,” but is struggling to move to a phase where “productivity associated with gains from trade will increase even more.”

The lack of necessary elements that reduce the level of transaction costs is one of the biggest problems of a transition economy. In particular, rapid changes in the political sphere inevitably lead to serious gaps in the legal infrastructure. In a “turbulent” society, the level of mutual trust is also low. As a result, transaction costs begin to predetermine a lot in such an economy: their gigantic size not only inflates prices, but also slows down the development of new markets and erects barriers to investment.

Huge environmental resistance leads to the fact that the economy responds to all incentives slowly and reluctantly. Firms stubbornly exploit obsolete production assets and are in no hurry to satisfy existing effective demand. And it is no coincidence: if you calculate commercial operations taking into account transaction costs, many of them will turn out to be unprofitable.

We find evidence in favor of this thesis in everyday life. Perhaps the most striking of them is the high cost, typical for Russia, with a still low level of quality of goods and services (in 2002, Moscow took second place in the list of the most expensive megacities in the world). Moreover, in the form of unjustified high prices, this problem is typical for the most prosperous domestic markets. Many secondary markets simply do not exist, since transaction costs have set a barrier to entry into the industry. This deprives us of a large number of benefits of civilization.

Any potential participant in such a market will face the following problems:

1) there is no reliable protection of the enterprise and its clients from crime;

2) the tax pressure is too great;

3) there are no reliable suppliers, since many other markets are not developed (high costs of searching and concluding supply contracts);

4) there is no qualified personnel (the cost of finding the necessary specialists);

5) there is no mechanism for resolving disputes (costs of coercion);

6) the monetary system is underdeveloped or unstable, which complicates settlements with all counterparties.

The least developed markets are those that are most dependent on the normal functioning of the transaction mechanism. An interesting example of this type is the loan capital market in Russia. The underdevelopment of collateral legislation and the lack of effective ways to hold unscrupulous borrowers accountable lead to an increase in interest rates and a marginal reduction in borrowing volumes.

Certain market segments (for example, interbank lending) are hardly developing. The problem that subjects face is similar to that of the elderly insurance market. At high interest rates, those banks that lack liquid assets will most likely act as borrowers. It is almost impossible to find out the true financial condition of the borrower; therefore, risk arises. The result is a market fiasco: an almost complete absence of interbank lending.

The shadow sector can be considered a special zone in a transition economy, in which many small and medium-sized entrepreneurs prefer to work. The peculiarity of their situation is that the legalization of business is hampered by high costs (associated mainly with taxes).

However, remaining in the shadows, the company finds itself in that area of ​​the economy where transaction costs reach their maximum. The state almost completely withdraws from its functions of “arbiter” and “policeman”. Accordingly, no one guarantees shadow entrepreneurs their property rights. The company's rights under contracts are also not secured in any way. Subjects must solve these problems themselves and bear the corresponding costs. Under these conditions, investments become extremely risky and unprofitable. There are difficulties with lending. In addition, such a business is very difficult to sell: the new owners of the company cannot be sure of the legitimacy of the rights to the acquired assets. As a consequence, firms remain minimal in size, despite the potential benefits of economies of scale.

The concept of transaction costs allows us to explain why in “transition countries”, with a low capital-labor ratio, there is little investment.

The fact is that investments in a developing market are blocked by high transaction costs: potential benefits are instantly eaten up by all sorts of unproductive expenses (bribes, delays, agency costs, protection of company property, etc.). In addition, investments in a transition economy are accompanied by the highest risks, which are caused primarily by the expectation of uncertain transaction costs at the post stage of the project. Indeed, if you look at a developing market through the eyes of a potential investor, the following typical problems become apparent:

1. Changes in legislation. In a transition economy, laws change constantly. Accordingly, there is an increased risk of revising the rules of the game to the disadvantage of the owner.

2. Vagueness of the legal field. Typically, in developing countries, legislation is structured in such a way that a lot is left to the discretion of the official (it is not laws that rule, but people). This significantly increases uncertainty and increases the risk of any investment.

3.Weak enforcement mechanism. If certain rules are established for the economy, then it is also necessary to provide for a mechanism for their enforcement (coercion). In countries with economies in transition, laws are often simply declared, but not guaranteed. In order to practically ensure the observance of one’s rights, it is necessary to incur certain expenses (for example, to bribe an official for an expedited resolution of an issue that he is already obliged to quickly resolve).

4. Risk of illegal attacks. This feature is a consequence of the previous problem. The danger of illegal encroachment comes not only from competing entities, but also from officials (a manifestation of corruption) and the state (in the form of nationalization).

5. Opacity of reporting. Agency costs have already been discussed above. They arise with the separation of the functions of the owner of the company and its manager. An investor who is not directly involved in the work of the company must be able to control the actions of his agents (management). In developed countries, the emergence of new modern accounting and auditing methods has reduced the previously high costs of obtaining information and monitoring business transactions. Firms have become transparent to their owners. In a young market, this problem still persists.

The listed factors force subjects to switch to less capital-intensive and shorter projects. Thus, they are deprived of the opportunity to benefit from large long-term investments in productive capital, which are associated with such impressive successes of the modern market economy. Thus, high transaction costs and lack of long-term investment lead to numerous negative consequences.

In developed countries, a significant share of transaction costs is caused by an increase in the number of potential subjects of economic relations, and, consequently, the number of transactions carried out by them. In countries with transition economies, the high level of transaction costs is also due to the fact that the mechanism of interaction between government agencies and business entities has not yet been developed.

For the Russian economy, the costs of institutional transformation are a significant component of transaction costs. Many features of the transition period are largely determined by these costs. Their essence lies in the fact that when an institution changes without connection with the transformation of rules for other institutions, a dead end is created in solving current problems. We are talking about the lack of necessary coordination of macroeconomic regulators.

An ineffective stable norm (ineffective institution) is called an institutional trap. For example, the development of barter in mechanical engineering was accompanied by a corresponding drop in profitability. The stability of an institutional trap means that with small disturbances the system remains in an institutional trap, only slightly changing its parameters, and returns to its previous state when the source of disturbance is eliminated.

The existence of institutional traps largely determined the specifics of the market transformation of the Russian economy. The changes taking place in recent decades in Russia and other countries of the former USSR form rich empirical material. Reforms aimed at the best liberal goals gave such contradictory results that it turned a theoretical paradox into a very real problem: the abolition of planning led not to an increase in production, but to its deep decline; the destruction of the system of comprehensive control over the population did not lead to the formation of a free civil society, but to the growth of criminal and deviant behavior; the abandonment of the monopoly on foreign trade resulted in a spontaneous export of capital and natural resources.

In large-scale reforms, the costs of institutional transformation are borne by both the state budget and individual firms.

Transaction costs are borne by legal entities and individuals conducting economic activities within the framework of established institutions, while the state is not burdened with such costs. With large-scale restructuring, the costs of institutional transformation fall on both individual economic participants and the state. This is one of the main differences between the two types of costs. Another important difference is that the former falls under the category of ongoing non-production costs, while the latter falls under the category of non-recurring (capital) costs. This means that transaction costs are permanent in nature and their burden always weighs on the enterprise, and transformation losses arise only periodically - at moments of change in the company’s interaction with the outside world. Any transformation, especially a large-scale one, leads to one degree or another to disorganization of the system, which aggravates the costs of adaptation.

Neoliberal theory (which underlies shock therapy) ignored the costs of institutional transformation, not allowing even the thought that the construction of a new design of the economic mechanism might be beyond society’s means. Of course, it is difficult to accurately calculate the costs of institutional transformation. However, by the beginning of 1992, there was already experience from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which could serve as a guide for the former republics of the USSR.

The real cost of reforms in Eastern European countries and former post-Soviet republics is still waiting to be assessed. There is no doubt that it is huge. After 8-10 years of reform, by 1998, only two of the 25 countries (Poland and Slovenia) had reached the pre-reform level of GDP. At the same time, in most CIS countries the decline in GDP exceeded 40%. Only in Uzbekistan, where the reforms were the least radical, this figure was about 15%.

It is known that the rate of growth (or decline) of GDP for reforming economies significantly depends on the initial conditions. Analysis of the costs of institutional transformation allows us to explain the mechanism of this dependence. The worse the initial quality of institutions, the more investment is diverted to their improvement; The further the system is from equilibrium, the longer the transition process and the greater the losses from disorganization. The distance from equilibrium means a large scale of redistribution of transition rent, which means large losses due to the struggle for it.

Due to the large number and variety of types of institutional traps in transition economies, there is a need to classify them. Having ranked the traps by level of importance in society, we obtain the following distribution:

1. The trap of adaptation economics;

2. Shadow economy;

3. Corruption;

4. Administrative barriers;

5. Tolling;

6. The trap of undervaluation of privatized fixed assets;

7. Resource-institutional trap;

8. The trap of degradation of public administration institutions;

9. The trap of conservative forms of regulation of social and labor relations;

10. Post-privatization trap;

11. The trap of the social contact model when organizing the production of educational services;

12. Barter;

13. Non-payments;

14. Tax evasion;

15. Interest rate trap;

16. Currency trap;

17. Low pay trap;

18. Inflationary spiral of an unproductive economy;

19. Low savings rate trap;

20. Stagnation trap;

21. The shadow wage trap;

22. The trap of inefficient growth of the banking sector.

Thus, the above institutional traps are essentially transaction costs in a transition economy.

Let us assess the value of total transaction costs for large state-owned industrial enterprises in the process of institutional transformation of the Russian economy, that is, taking into account the corresponding institutional traps (see Table 1). Let’s take the “technologically necessary” cost as a starting point. Let us take into account the increase in transaction costs due to corruption, barter, and administrative barriers.

Table 1. Estimation of additional transaction costs of institutional transformation in Russia in the mid-90s, %

Let us separately note the specifics of the Russian transition period: the state paid large enterprises largely through cash offsets, the discount on which was about 30%.

If we take into account the additional costs associated with harsh natural and climatic conditions and the vast territory of the country, we can conclude that during the process of institutional transformation, many Russian enterprises worked in the mode of “eating” previously accumulated assets. In such a situation, ensuring the competitiveness of the domestic economy is the main task, and estimates of transaction costs must be taken into account to develop an adequate industrial policy.

Chapter 3. Transaction costs and their impact on market functioning

3.1. Transaction costs as a barrier to entry into the small business market

The development of market relations has sharply updated the topic of barriers to entry into the market for small businesses. But what does it mean to enter the market? Is it enough to go through the formal registration procedure? If not, what are the additional conditions for overcoming barriers to entry? These and similar questions are of a practical nature, since the height and configuration of the entry barrier are limiting factors in the development of small businesses, which in turn affects the competitiveness of the market environment, the quality of goods and their affordability for consumers.

Let us consider ten years of experience of Russian entrepreneurship through the prism of the dynamics of transaction costs, which determine the height of barriers to entry into the market.

Entering the market is a procedure for establishing and maintaining contractual relations with the main counterparties of market interaction. With this understanding, the process of overcoming entry barriers is not so much a set of standard organizational actions as a figurative name for a strategy for expanding and modifying the horizons of entrepreneurial activity. Accordingly, the problem of entry barriers is relevant both for those who are taking their first steps in business and for experienced entrepreneurs. To denote the costs associated with servicing contractual relations, as well as the transfer, specification and protection of property rights, the term transaction costs is used.

Overcoming barriers to entry into the market means the resource ability of an economic entity, in addition to the costs directly for the production of goods or services, to bear the costs associated with the establishment and functioning of contractual relations with all counterparties in the external and internal environment of the business organization.

Counterparties in the external environment of a business organization are state and local authorities, partner and competitive enterprises, market infrastructure objects, the media, consumers, etc. The subjects of contractual relations in the internal environment of a business organization are employees and business units. Establishing mutually acceptable conditions for interaction with all groups of subjects - representatives of interests in the external and internal environment of a business organization - is a resource-intensive procedure. Its price is transaction costs.

The fact of contractuality in the external and internal environment of the enterprise indicates the presence of transaction costs. However, their form, size and structure are determined by the spectrum of economic, political and social characteristics of market interaction.

Industry segments of market entry: dynamics of priorities. Obviously, transaction costs are determined by the industry of the enterprise. Inter-industry differentiation of their size is not limited to differences in licensing fees, but represents payment for a wide range of intra-industry practices (legal and illegal), outside of which the business is doomed to failure. Thus, the organization of a casino “prescribes” special solvent attention to security agencies, the opening of a cafe - to sanitary and epidemiological stations, trade in non-ferrous metals - to licensed structures, and export-import operations - to customs services. It is logical to assume that in those industries where transaction costs were temporarily relatively low, there was an increase in entrepreneurial “debuts”. Thus, shifts in the industry preferences of debutant entrepreneurs serve as an indirect indicator of the dynamics of transaction costs of entering the market depending on the industry segment of entry.

Indeed, the industry preferences of aspiring entrepreneurs vary greatly. Against the backdrop of a consistently high commitment to trade, the degree of “trade concentration” of debutants varies significantly. “Entrepreneurs, whose initiative dates back to the late 80s, have entered a wide range of industries with a high degree of intensity. The exceptions were industries of clearly defined “market origin”: finance, credit, insurance, general commercial activities to ensure the functioning of the market. Until the mid-90s, industry priorities for entering the market were eroding. This did not affect only wholesale trade, the growing attention to which from private business dates back to a later period (the second half of the 90s), which can be explained by the inertia of legislation in this area.

But since 1996 the situation has changed dramatically. Retail trade, catering and consumer services are becoming the main industry segment for entering the market. Moreover, the possibility of further repurposing also tends to decrease. Channels of vertical mobility and “inter-sectoral drift” are increasingly narrowing.

Figuratively speaking, entrepreneurs whose activities began in 1996-1997, unlike the “pioneers” (late 80s - early 90s), concentrated their efforts primarily on a narrow sector of the industry segment of market entry - small retail trade , household services and catering. Establishing contractual relations in other industries is becoming an increasingly resource-intensive process due to increased requirements for the amount of start-up capital (financial, intellectual, social connections, etc.) and the volume of transaction costs associated with the functioning.”

An important role was played by the differences in transaction costs not only in size, but also in the degree of legality. In conditions of widespread shadow economic relations between market agents, the ability of an economic entity to bear the burden of transaction costs is determined not by the absolute indicator of its solvency, but by the structure of income according to the degree of their legality. Meanwhile, the proportions of shadow and legal business activities are largely determined by the industry affiliation of the company. The potential for illegal behavior is nothing more than an organizational resource for adaptation to an unfavorable economic environment. The inability to function effectively in a legal regime has led to the priority development of those industries whose shadow activities have an ingrained tradition.

Manufacturing, unlike commerce, is characterized by a significantly lower potential for illegal activity. There are many objective reasons for this, for example, the inability of production structures to close and open with a certain regularity under a new name, which reduces their maneuverability in dialogue with the tax department. Accordingly, the subjective assessment of the risk of shadow activity increases, which acts as a factor limiting the spread of illegal practices. The predominantly shadow nature of transaction costs has a particularly difficult impact on industries whose potential for illegal activity is relatively low. This explains the unattractiveness of such industries as industry, construction, transport and communications, which is another value-cultural criterion for the suitability of the social quality of starting entrepreneurs.

Problems of organization and functioning of enterprises depending on the time of their creation. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that the degree of severity of entrepreneurship problems and their hierarchy are determined by the time of start of entrepreneurial activity. At the same time, of particular interest is not the nominal list of problems of entrepreneurship, and not even its transformation over time, but the structure of transaction costs that “extend” this or that problem situation.

The data indicate a change in the composition of problems in the initial phase of the enterprise life cycle (Table 1).

Table 1. Problems of the initial period and 1997 Depending on the time of establishment of the enterprise, %

In dynamics, the difficulties of the initial period, despite government programs to support entrepreneurship, the growing loyalty of the population to innovative behavior, the creation of market infrastructure and other indicators of favorable treatment, are intensifying. In general, the share of entrepreneurs who have not experienced problems in the initial period is approximately proportional to their entrepreneurial experience: those who created an entrepreneurial structure earlier experienced fewer difficulties at the initial stage of its development.

The presence of a problem requires the diversion of resources to solve it. “Coping with a problem” means being able to bear the resource costs (financial, material, intellectual) associated with its solution. These costs, as a rule, are in the nature of transaction costs, since they are designed to establish a system of compromise agreement between the participants in the problem situation.

The largest factor load falls on problems of interaction with external agents (criminal structures and government agencies), and the smallest on problems of the professional viability of the entrepreneur and the attitude of the population. The material conditions of business activity (finance, material and technical base, access to premises) occupy an intermediate position.

These problem fields generate transaction costs aimed at coordinating the interests of agents involved in a particular problem. For example, the problem of access to premises gives rise to transaction costs in the form of payment for the services of the “managers” of the premises of municipal authorities, as well as consultants and lawyers brought in for assistance. And establishing contractual relations with the criminal world means expenses for paying for security services, resolving conflict situations, insuring partnership non-compliance, etc.

It should be especially noted that the problems of interaction with authorities and the criminal world are one factor. This indicates a high probability of coincidence in the circle of enterprises that have problems with both the authorities and criminal structures, in other words, the authorities are just as selectively partial to entrepreneurs as the criminal world. Particular attention from both sides is given to enterprises whose industry affiliation and scale of activity suggest the presence of excess profits. Its division is the essence of the problems that accompany the dialogue of entrepreneurs both with the authorities and with security groups.

Problems of increasing relevance include problems of access to finance and obtaining licenses (Table 1). But if the lack of financial resources is a constant leader on the list of problems, then the sharp complication of licensing practices is a new and alarming phenomenon. In 1996-1997 Licensing problems took second place after the financial deficit, pushing aside logistical problems. This means that in the structure of transaction costs the share of those who “serve” the dialogue with financial structures and government bodies has increased. Such costs can appear both in illegal form (bribes, equity participation in non-performing loans, etc.) and in legal form (for example, payment for consultations on licensing terms).

Problems of logistics, access to premises, and racketeering are characterized by decreasing relevance (Table 1). The problem of finding information about business partners has virtually disappeared. This inevitably affects the structure of transaction costs, which increasingly have as their “addressees” subjects of the real estate market and material and technical means, as well as representatives of the power services market.

The problems identified as “pressure from local authorities” are surprisingly resilient. Without claiming to be particularly acute, they consistently complicated the lives of 9-15% of entrepreneurs during their formation in this capacity (Table 1). The most common way to “solve” problems with the authorities is a banal bribe. The stability of the problem generates the stability of the cost item in the secret budget of transaction costs of entrepreneurs.

As a result, two facts can be stated. Firstly, the share of entrepreneurs who have not experienced problems practically does not depend on the length of business activity and is approximately one third (29-38%). Secondly, managers are much more likely to encounter serious problems when organizing enterprises than during their ongoing operation. Moreover, the later the start of entrepreneurial activity is dated, the more noticeable this discrepancy is (Table 1).

So, the difficulties of “entering” the market increase over time. This means that transaction costs that serve the process of overcoming barriers to entry into the market tend to increase species diversity and increase financial impressiveness. But those who have overcome the barrier to entry into the market experience approximately the same burden of problems. At the same time, problems associated with the organization of the enterprise are more common than with its functioning.

Negative practices (racketeering, bribes, non-obligatory partners) and experience as an entrepreneur. Relations with authorities, law enforcement agencies and partners are the most essential components of entrepreneurial success. This is a worldwide practice. In this case, Russia only confirms it, which, however, does not prevent it from demonstrating its specificity - the predominantly shadow nature of the emerging relations. It is fundamentally important that the establishment of contractual relations with these subjects of market interaction inevitably condemns the entrepreneur to transaction costs. It is the ability of an economic entity to bear the burden of transaction costs that is one of the most important guarantees for successfully overcoming “barriers to entry” into the market space. But if there is no alternative to the presence of transaction costs serving relations with these most influential interest groups in the external environment of a business organization (authority, partners, the criminal world), then their form and size allow for variations. This could be, for example, legal payments for services, or it could be illegal financing of a corrupt government apparatus.

“The presence of bribery, threats of force and violation of obligations in Russian entrepreneurship is confirmed by the absolute majority of respondents. Thus, only 14% of entrepreneurs deny the existence of bureaucratic extortion, 22% deny racketeering, and 9% deny the non-compliance of partners.”

But the days of “bribes in envelopes” are over. Currently, they come in a wide variety of forms. In essence, we are talking about different material and organizational forms of transaction costs that entrepreneurs pay for the right to establish mutually acceptable rules for interaction with government agencies. These include tourist routes for a symbolic price, individual work at mass production prices, provision of a share in one’s own enterprise, etc.

Functionally, bribes are divided into those that speed up the resolution of some issue and those that are the only, non-alternative way to solve the problem. The fact of uncontested bribery is extremely important, since a bribe, being an indicator of the financial ability of an entrepreneur to concentrate large sums, provokes interest in him from criminal structures. In addition, a bribe also indicates the undesirability of a meeting between an entrepreneur and law enforcement agencies. It is precisely such entrepreneurs who become, first and foremost, financial donors to the criminal world. Thus, a bribe solves some problems and creates others, adding links to a complex chain of transaction costs.

“The mechanism of bribes is used most intensively when solving problems related to various types of permits for economic activities (46%); with access to premises (35%), to loans (24%), and the least - with ensuring business security (14%).”

The criminal world is increasingly limiting the list of applicants for “business games”, but is building its relationships with those who have established themselves as “players” all the more harshly. In this sense, the role of criminal structures in creating “barriers to entry” has weakened compared to the situation two or three years ago. This means a reduction in the share of costs servicing dialogue with law enforcement agencies in the total volume of transaction costs to overcome barriers to entry into the market. However, those who overcome these barriers find themselves in the space of already established canons of interaction with crime. However, these canons are becoming more and more multivariate.

Accordingly, the differentiation of transaction costs associated with the need to have a power partner depends more and more on the industry of the enterprise and is less and less determined by the dexterity or individual luck of the entrepreneur. The costs of contractual relationships with the security forces, characteristic of a particular industry, are becoming more and more unified in size and diversified in form. You can enter into relationships with the FSB, you can with private security agencies, you can with criminal structures. You can pay into the thieves' common fund, or you can become a sponsor of a police department - the differences in the amount of spending will be insignificant.

Thus, the dynamics of transaction costs is a unique reflection of the changing conditions for the development of Russian entrepreneurship during the market reform. In general, the conditions for entry into most industry markets have become seriously more complicated, and compared to the situation five years ago, the barrier to entry has increased significantly.

To summarize, two conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, the category of transaction costs, which has significant research traditions in Western science, becomes a methodological key to the study of Russian reality, in particular, the height and configuration of barriers to entry into the market for new business entities. And we are not talking about blindly borrowing Western models, but about using an apparatus that is adequate to the market nature of the dialogue between all participants in the business environment. The methodological potential of this approach is higher, the more noticeable in the expenses of economic entities is the share of costs not directly related to the production of goods and services. And for modern Russia this is most typical with its vast formalized labyrinths of legal business and informal practices for overcoming them.

Secondly, transaction costs of overcoming barriers to entry into the market for new business entities have certainly increased compared to the situation five to seven years ago. However, it would be a clear simplification to consider this process uniform across industries, regions, organizational and legal forms, etc. With a general tendency towards their growth, the configuration of entry barriers was quite dynamic, and individual components of the barrier situation (educational and gender preferences) became even less tough. In general, it should be noted that there is a clear dominance of informal practices in overcoming barriers to entry, which is a certain social filter that limits the attitudes of start-up entrepreneurs towards legal behavior.

3.2. Transaction costs of overcoming administrative barriers are economic losses to society

One of the pressing problems of the Russian economy is the high level of administrative barriers when carrying out economic activities. Administrative barriers in the economy are rules established by decisions of government bodies, compliance with which is a mandatory condition for conducting activities in the market, incoming payments for going through bureaucratic procedures that usually do not go to the budget.

Administrative barriers arise in the following situations:

When gaining access to resources and ownership rights to them (registration of an enterprise, registration of changes in the status of an enterprise, its statutory documents, obtaining the right to rent premises, access to loans, etc.);

Upon receipt of the right to carry out economic activity (its licensing, registration of goods, certification of goods and services, etc.);

In the current implementation of economic activities (sanctions for violations of established rules, coordination of decisions made with regulatory organizations, receipt of various benefits).

This “barrier” nature of regulation has a number of significant negative consequences. Firstly, it leads to serious economic losses for society, both direct, expressed in rising prices, and indirect, due to underproduction of GDP due to inefficient use of resources. Secondly, it does not solve the problems for which barriers are actually created, while making it difficult to use other, more effective methods of government regulation. Thirdly, the “barrier” nature of the economy provides fertile ground for the rent-seeking behavior of government officials and associated commercial structures involved in the “barrier” business.

Economic losses to society from the establishment of administrative barriers to business activities consist of two components:

Transaction costs (payments for the right to use resources) caused by the need to overcome barriers, a significant part of which is transformed into population losses due to rising retail prices - direct losses;

A drop in the efficiency of using available resources and underproduction of value (the presence of administrative barriers significantly complicates entry into the market, primarily for small and medium-sized businesses, which leads to a decrease in the level of competition according to the overall efficiency of the economy) - indirect losses.

Quantifying the direct losses to society from the presence of administrative barriers is quite a complex matter, like any quantitative analysis of transaction costs. Let us consider estimates of the cost of individual administrative barriers, as well as some estimates of overall direct losses from the presence of such barriers in the Russian economy.

Registration of legal entities, according to entrepreneurs themselves, does not act as an insurmountable barrier to entry into the market. However, already at this stage we can talk about unproductive losses of entrepreneurs, amounting to a significant amount nationwide. There are two possible ways to register an enterprise: independently and using an intermediary company. It can be assumed that the market value of intermediary services is approximately equal to the costs of entrepreneurs for self-registration of enterprises (additional costs of time and resources), since the market for intermediary services is competitive.

The cost of registering a “turnkey” standard enterprise in Moscow is about 12,000 rubles, in the regions it ranges from 2,000 to 10,000 rubles. The price of registration varies depending on the nature of the enterprise and the region. In addition, the cost of intermediary services for registration may include the provision of a legal address. The average cost of registration in the country is, according to various estimates, from 4,600 rubles. (registration costs are equal to the average cost of intermediary services) up to 10,000 rubles. (other costs of entrepreneurs that occur even when using the services of intermediaries are added to the cost of intermediary services). In 2000, about 30,000 enterprises were registered in Russia every month. Thus, the total costs of registering enterprises in 2000 ranged from 138 million to 300 million rubles. monthly, and on an annual basis - from 60 million to 130 million dollars. At the same time, the official registration fee rate varied by region - from 0.5 to 10 minimum wages. If we take 5 minimum wages as the average value, then official payments for registration were approximately 12 million rubles monthly. Thus, registration fees themselves accounted for less than 10% of the total costs associated with registration.

In Kuzbass they tried to solve the registration problem by transferring the right to register enterprises and firms from the territorial registration chambers to the tax inspectorates. Tax officials claim that this will simplify the registration procedure and remove unnecessary administrative barriers that have hindered entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, in turn, expect leapfrogs with constituent documents, and law firms see new opportunities for their business in the new registration procedure. According to the developers of the law, its strength is registration based on the “one-window” principle and the procedure by which shell companies are destroyed. Within 5 days the enterprise will be registered, and after another 5 days it will be entered into the Unified State Register of Taxpayers. In this case, the exact coincidence of the actual and legal addresses of the organization is important. The most important thing is that all procedures are truly simplified and quite large savings are created on a national scale.

Mandatory certification of goods and services, which covers about 80% of the product range, is another administrative barrier. According to minimum estimates, calculated according to the recommendations of the State Standard of the Russian Federation, amounts equivalent to 120-150 million dollars are “pumped” from industry and trade in the form of certification fees. in year.

Licensing of certain types of activities also serves as a very noticeable administrative barrier. In 2000 In Russia, more than 500 types of activities were subject to licensing, of which about 250 were based on the federal law “On Licensing of Certain Types of Activities”, the rest were subject to licensing on the basis of other laws and by-laws of constituent entities of the Russian Federation. Moreover, since the adoption of the law “On licensing of certain types of activities” in 1995. There is a tendency towards a constant expansion of the list of activities subject to licensing, including through their unjustified fragmentation.

Despite the fact that the law clearly defines that licensing includes state bodies and local government bodies, in practice departmental and regional licensing, expert and other centers are being created en masse, contacting which to obtain a pre-licensing expert opinion is mandatory. Decisions on the creation of such centers are made, as a rule, by departmental regulations and decisions of regional or local administrations. There are also exceptions in the form of direct entries in government regulations.

An example is the licensing practice in St. Petersburg. Licensing of all types of activities is carried out with the obligatory pre-licensing inspection (examination) of the applicant to determine its compliance with licensing requirements and conditions. Pre-licensing examination is carried out both by specialists of the Licensing Chamber and by expert centers accredited by it. An audit of the territorial administration of the MAP of Russia showed that in the period from July 1 to November 19, 1999, expert centers performed 1,424 examinations, while specialists from the Licensing Chamber performed 586. According to the results of the analysis of assignments to expert centers, which are issued by the Licensing Chamber for pre-licensing examination, The range of issues that are the subject of the examination includes exclusively checking the accuracy of the license, information and documents submitted by the applicant. At the same time, commercial organizations, including direct competitors of license applicants and licensees, were accredited by the Licensing Chamber as independent expert organizations. As a result of the spread of this practice, business entities, in addition to the license fee itself, are forced to pay for imposed services for pre-licensing examination of documentation, and the content of such examinations actually duplicates the functions of licensing authorities, which are obliged to verify the accuracy of the documentation submitted to obtain a license.

Unfortunately, in Russia there have been no studies analyzing the total costs of entrepreneurs associated with obtaining licenses, so it is difficult to talk about specific figures for the economic losses of society from the presence of this administrative barrier. However, we can cite a calculation made by specialists from the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of the Russian Federation for one type of license. Thus, the procedure for obtaining a license for bread production includes visiting up to 8 authorities, completing more than 20 documents, and costs up to 15 thousand rubles. and about 270 hours of time. The cost per unit of production increases by 3%. On an annual basis, this means more than $100 million in additional costs for the population. However, the presence of a license does not guarantee the quality of the product.

Another administrative barrier for which quantitative estimates of transaction costs were carried out is the marking of products with marks of conformity protected from counterfeiting, introduced on the basis of Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of May 17, 1997 No. 601. Calculations made by specialists of the International Confederation of Consumer Societies (ConfOP) on order of the INP "Social Contract", showed that the approximate volume of the market for marks of conformity and registration marks amounted to 150-200 million dollars in 2000. Moreover, the costs of trade organizations for applying the mark were equal to 50-70 million dollars. That is the total costs of overcoming this administrative barrier were equal to 200-270 million dollars [Auzan A., Kryuchkova P. Administrative barriers in the economy: tasks of unblocking // Questions of Economics. – 2001. - No. 5].

If we talk about economic losses as a result of ongoing control over the activities of business entities by various regulatory agencies, they consist of two parts: direct costs of paying fines and “compensation” and unproductive time. Data from a survey of small businesses conducted by the Russian Independent Institute of Social and National Problems in 1999 show that the costs associated with “shadow” payments to regulatory authorities and unproductive time spent are comparable to payments to racketeers.

According to data obtained during in-depth interviews with business managers in Moscow, total payments (including fines imposed) in the organized retail trade sector amount to about 1 thousand rubles. per month per workplace. At the same time, the ratio of costs associated with unproductive use of working time and penalties (official and unofficial) is on average 3 to 2.

In the field of investment activity, a significant obstacle to its implementation is the numerous approvals with executive authorities at the regional and local levels, as well as with the rules governing the activities of designers. It should be borne in mind that many requirements for investment projects are not codified, so it is not possible to take them into account at the project development stage. The cost of approving design documentation is about 10-15% of the cost of the project delivered to the customer on a turnkey basis.

In the Kemerovo region, an expert advisory council on investment activities has been created under the governor. The council will deal with issues of development and government support for investment activities in Kuzbass. It included representatives of the regional Council of People's Deputies, heads of industrial enterprises, representatives of science and business. This advisory body is vested with broad powers and will make decisions, including on supporting investment projects and providing state support for their implementation, up to the preparation of bills for maximum support for the implementation of a specific project. This measure, taken by the administration of the Kemerovo region, can significantly reduce transaction costs in the investment activities of Kuzbass.

Similar costs arise when obtaining public procurement contracts, subsidies or loans through government business support mechanisms. As V. Radaev noted: “In general, the amount of transaction costs associated with paying for the services of government officials varies from “modest” gifts (the cost of which can now be measured in one or several hundred dollars) to 10% of the amount of the allocated subsidy or the value of the secured contract .

An assessment of the total direct losses of the Russian economy from the presence of administrative barriers is given in a study conducted by a group of specialists from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov, under the leadership of V. Tambovtsev. According to his data, the monthly additional costs of overcoming administrative barriers in the sphere of trade and production amounted to 18-19 billion rubles. The monthly retail trade turnover in 2000 was approximately 188 billion rubles. Thus, the share of extortions in trade turnover was about 10%. Costs to consumers from the presence of administrative barriers and transaction costs of overcoming them ranged from 500 to 550 rubles. per month per family.

Thus, specific examples of administrative barriers in the Russian economy once again confirmed the presence of high transaction costs in it, which are transformed into significant direct economic losses to society.

3.3. Transaction costs at the micro level – low rates of individual savings

Today, many experts admit that the sluggish growth of the Russian economy is largely due to high transaction costs. If we project the now classic studies of transaction costs onto Russian reality, we can confidently say that high transaction costs are an integral feature of developing markets. Moreover, the influence of transaction costs on economic growth is not limited to the problems of specification of property rights and depersonalization of exchange. By influencing the length of working hours of individuals and the supply of labor, transaction costs create a “vicious circle” of low rates of accumulation, the exit from which is quite difficult.

One of the most obvious manifestations of market imperfections is significant differences in prices for the same product. In such conditions, the traditional dilemma of “buy or produce” for an economy of high transaction costs becomes secondary to the alternative “buy or look for a better price.” The spread of prices in today's markets cannot but increase the uncertainty of future markets. In conditions of imperfection of present and uncertainty of future markets, the most reliable economic parameters of consumer behavior are the wage rate and the level of current consumption, which determine the distribution of income between consumption and savings.

An individual spends part of his time searching for the best price for purchasing the consumer goods he needs. The lack of reliable information about current prices and the uncertainty of the prices of future transactions do not allow him to carry out the classical redistribution of income between consumption and accumulation, taking into account the interest rate. Therefore, in the process of searching for the best price, he seeks to create a reserve intended for future consumption, naturally wanting to reserve the maximum possible amount.

In an imperfect market, an individual has the opportunity to maximize the absolute value of the reserve by searching for a favorable price for goods that constitute his chosen level of current consumption. Search time reduces operating time. Accordingly, at a given wage rate, an individual’s income decreases. But the search also brings positive results. Thanks to search, costs are also reduced, since at a given level of consumption the transaction price decreases as the search time increases.

Searching for a better price refers to any pastime that is an alternative to working for hire and creates income by saving on price. It also includes the purchase of semi-finished products in order to bring them to the level of consumption, when the alternative “buy or search” is transformed into the “buy or produce” paradigm, classic for the theory of transaction costs.

Having determined the desired level of consumption, the individual begins to replace working time with time for searching for a low price. Naturally, the individual will search until the gain from the price difference is greater than the lost wages. Accordingly, at the stage of searching for a low price, the rate of decrease in expenses will be higher than the rate of decrease in income. But if an individual already knows where to find the most attractive prices, then he will not waste time searching. In this case, income will decrease faster than expenses at the very beginning of the search.

By analyzing certain combinations of individual and market parameters, differences between developed and developing markets can be identified. If we accept as a hypothesis that in a model of behavior in an underdeveloped market economy the wage rate is low and the price dispersion is high, then in order to achieve the optimal ratio of expenses and income it is necessary that consumption be low and the tendency to replace working time with search time - high. The model of behavior in a developed market economy will be different. A high wage rate and a slight dispersion of prices determine a high level of consumption and a low propensity to replace working time with search time. In developed markets, an increase in search time is accompanied by a decrease in both work time and “pure leisure” time. In imperfect markets, the situation may be completely different. An increase in search time leads to a decrease in work time and to an increase, rather than a decrease, in “pure leisure” time. Therefore, other things being equal, the search for cheap goods in imperfect markets has the very beneficial side effect of increasing the amount of “pure leisure” time.

As a result, it is possible to establish an interdependence between the degree of market imperfection, the possibility of replacing working time with search, and the propensities to consume and accumulate: given the wage rate and the degree of market imperfection, the lower the level of aspirations, the lower the willingness to replace working time with searching for cheap goods.

If we return to the analysis of an individual’s behavior model at the micro level, then one of the most interesting ways of its development is the study of the possibility of economies of scale in search. This phenomenon is well known and has various explanations. For example, search economies of scale can be conceptualized as a reduction in the unit fixed search costs associated with a trip to a store.

Let's consider the individual's ability to increase current consumption by redistributing time. Suppose an individual decides to increase current consumption by increasing working time. In this case, he is forced to reduce the search time. But reducing search time automatically increases the price of purchased goods. This means that an attempt to increase consumption by increasing working hours will be unsuccessful. Reducing search time will raise prices in such a way that the income increased due to increased working time will be spent on fewer, rather than more, goods. And in order to optimize the ratio of income and expenses with increasing working hours, it is necessary to reduce consumption.

But a completely different situation develops if an individual decides to increase consumption not by reducing search time, but by increasing it relative to the optimal one. There will be economies of search scale.

Saving on the difference in price, which, with a smaller quantity of purchased goods, was irrational, since it did not cover the loss of working time, will become effective if the volume of consumption is increased relative to the search time. We would get the same result if we treated the trip to the store as a fixed cost of searching for products. Let's say, a trip to a hypermarket for one or two goods is irrational. But it immediately becomes justified if a small difference in price is multiplied by a large number of goods. But the presented model somewhat changes the understanding of such economies of scale. She draws our attention to the possibility of increasing consumption during the search itself, by increasing its time. The model reflects a situation where we spend more time in hypermarkets than planned. Having arrived there, we try to make the most of the trip, that is, to reduce its unit costs, but at the same time we buy more goods, spending more time. Thus, at a given wage rate, the volume of consumption can indeed be increased, but not by increasing working hours, but only by increasing the search for cheaper goods.

Now let's see how an increase in wage rate affects an individual's behavior model. At a constant wage rate, an attempt to increase work time results in a reduction in consumption due to an increase in the prices of purchased goods caused by a reduction in search time. This situation can easily be projected onto the growth of wage rates. A slight increase in the wage rate can simply be “eaten up” by higher prices if we reduce the search time for a job. In the presented model, the classical substitution effect has a very serious “enemy” in the form of prices in imperfect markets that depend on the search time. But this does not mean that this effect is impossible to manifest.

Firstly, with a significant increase in the wage rate, it will cover the increase in consumption and compensate for increased prices. Secondly, even with a not very significant increase in the wage rate, an individual can increase his working time. Moreover, he can even go to reduce consumption. It is in this light that the positive response to high overtime rates should be viewed. Consumption in such cases may actually be reduced. Such a “sacrifice” may be due to the motive of increasing work time in order to increase the accumulation rate. And in order to increase the rate of accumulation, an individual can reduce current consumption.

Of course, it is easier for an individual to increase not savings, but current consumption, using economies of scale in search and an increased wage rate. However, in this situation other restrictions begin to apply. When purchasing durable goods, the savings rate may still decrease. The increase in wage rates may not be enough to compensate for the reduction in working hours. If an individual tries to simultaneously keep the level of savings constant and save on the scale of search, then he will have to be content with saving on the scale of search for low-value goods. The latter is difficult to reconcile with the model of behavior when wages increase, which may imply an increase in the quality of consumption.

The higher the real wage, the less valuable goods are acquired due to economies of scale, provided that we strive to at least not reduce the amount of savings. A logical limitation on continuing the search is the quality of current consumption. But this limitation is weakened to a large extent if we, firstly, make the object of analysis food products, the demand for which has a very low elasticity, and, secondly, we consider the underconsumption of food products as the initial situation, when the desired level of consumption is initially unattainable due to the low wage rate, which implies a very low initial rate of accumulation. In this situation, an increase in real wages can increase both savings and current consumption of food products, but under one condition - the individual will easily sacrifice working time.

We must not forget that the degree of market imperfection also affects the dynamics of “pure leisure” time. In imperfect markets, an increase in search time is accompanied not by a reduction, but by an increase in “pure leisure” time. This factor can also influence decision making. In other words, in conditions of underdeveloped markets, underconsumption of food products and a low rate of accumulation, an increase in the wage rate is more likely to cause a reduction in working time than an increase in it.

In developed countries, the problem of underconsumption does not exist. However, it cannot be said about the markets of developed countries that they are perfect, at least in terms of price dispersion. And the imperfection of markets, or rather the dispersion of prices, greatly complicates the choice when increasing the wage rate. In such markets, not only the substitution effect, but also the income effect has a powerful counteraction. Redistribution of time can change either the rate of accumulation or the structure, or more precisely, the quality of consumption. Therefore, paradoxically, it is much easier for an individual not to redistribute time either in favor of work or in favor of searching. The rate of accumulation will remain unchanged, and the growth of consumption will correspond to the increase in the wage rate. This assumption coincides with the hypothesis of R. Ehrenberg and R. Smith. In their opinion, "a moment-by-moment analysis of men's work behavior as a whole leads to the conclusion that both the income effect and the substitution effect are small and perhaps even zero."

The answer to the question of why substitution and income effects may tend to zero for men can be found by examining the increase in the wage rate on the value of the reserve and the savings rate.

Keeping working time unchanged while wages increase leaves the rate of accumulation constant, but only if this rate of accumulation suits the individual. The situation when an individual spends previously accumulated funds or uses a consumer loan can only persist in the short term. Of course, the individual will strive to ensure that income exceeds expenses.

Now let's interpret the original model differently. Let the family's income be equal to its expenses, while the husband creates a reserve to support his wife. There is nothing unnatural in the assumption that the husband earns more, while the wife does most of the shopping. But the relative dynamics of working time for women’s search time is higher than the relative dynamics of purchase prices for the same search time. Since men and women in the family face markets with equal degrees of imperfection, with a higher level of consumption (purchases or bringing semi-finished products to the level of consumption, when, as is customary in many Eastern cultures, husbands do the shopping) and a lower wage rate, women's working hours will be more sensitive to changes in search time than in men. It is therefore not surprising that “research also finds, in general, that for women the substitution effect dominates the income effect.” Further development of the model may lead to the conclusion: an increase in the number of children can force men to save on their consumption and work more at a given wage rate, but an increase in the wage rate will force the father with many children to reduce his working hours.

Thus, since market perfection cannot be achieved overnight, and narrowing the price range of commodity markets takes some time, the problem of increasing the rate of accumulation is concentrated in the area of ​​employment and consumption. Therefore, it is obvious that in Russian conditions, massive imports of consumer goods, promoting conspicuous consumption, have a negative side effect. Moreover, the higher the share of durable goods in current consumption, the lower the accumulation rate.

In the context of the model provided, it is clear that in conditions of imperfect markets, the purchase of durable goods does not simply increase costs and “eat up” savings. Born in conditions of scattered prices, conspicuous consumption is accompanied by a reduction in working time in favor of searching for favorable prices or in favor of other sources of income. A kind of “vicious circle” arises. Historically low levels of consumption and low incomes should at first glance strengthen the substitution effect and stimulate labor supply. But in conditions of imperfect markets and large differences in prices for consumer goods, increasing wages stimulates the income effect. This effect is enhanced by the imperfection of the labor market itself, which makes it possible to increase not only search, but also “pure leisure” at the expense of working time. And conspicuous consumption only reinforces this trend.

Conclusion

Modern market relations are inextricably linked with the concept of transaction costs. They include costs associated with searching for information, costs of negotiations, work on measuring the properties of a product (service), costs of specification and protection of property rights, as well as costs associated with overcoming the opportunistic behavior of counterparties.

Political economy of the 19th century. actually abstracted from transaction costs. However, in the twentieth century. It became simply impossible not to notice them. In a market economy, where subjects are isolated from each other, a prerequisite for exchange is the ownership of goods by agents of economic relations. It is the owner, entering into market relations, who determines how and under what conditions the economic benefit will be transferred to another person, that is, what is the object of transfer: rights of use, possession, disposal, management, etc. Collection of the necessary data on the powers of the seller includes in the costs of searching for information and negotiating. Full ownership usually includes a whole set of rights: possession, use, disposal, management, the right to income, to the capital value of the good, to security, to transfer the good by inheritance or will, as well as perpetuity, prohibition of harmful use, liability in the form of collection and residual character.

The share of transaction costs is especially high in a society where property rights are poorly defined (specified), and the mechanism of interaction between government agencies and business entities has not been worked out. Such conditions are typical for countries transitioning to a market economy. Moreover, a significant component of transaction costs in a transition economy are the costs of institutional transformation (institutional traps). Many features of the transition period in Russia are largely explained by these costs. The insufficiently developed legal side of market relations creates favorable conditions for fraud, deception, and distortion of information about the consumer properties of goods and their real value.

Having examined the main manifestations of transaction costs in the modern Russian economy, the following fundamental conclusions can be drawn:

1. The Russian economy has already reached a level where “deal servicing” absorbs huge resources, but the productivity of a successful transaction continues to remain at a lower level compared to costs;

2. at the macro level, transaction costs manifest themselves, first of all, in the need to overcome administrative barriers when carrying out economic activities, which as a result leads to significant direct economic losses to society in the form of rising retail prices and underproduction of GDP due to inefficient use of resources;

3. transaction costs themselves are a significant barrier to entry into the market for small businesses, which in turn affects the competitiveness of the market environment, the quality of goods and their affordability for consumers;

4. at the micro level, transaction costs, affecting the length of working hours of individuals and the supply of labor, contribute to the creation of a low rate of accumulation.

Thus, transaction costs have a huge impact on the functioning of the market. Therefore, their accounting and minimization should represent the most important parameter of the economic activity of any company and the economy as a whole. Moreover, this is possible due to the improvement of legal norms, as well as strengthening the ethical foundation, honesty and responsibility, and the ideology of consensus in society. The latter direction can lead to the creation of soft market infrastructure and become the most effective and cost-effective way to protect the interests of everyone.

List of used literature:

1. Auzan A., Kryuchkova P. Administrative barriers in the economy: tasks of unblocking // Questions of Economics. – 2001. – No. 5.

2. Barsukova S. Yu. Transaction costs of entering the market of small businesses // Problems of forecasting. – 2000. – No. 1.

3. Gaidar E. Restorative growth and some features of the modern economic situation in Russia // Questions of Economics. – 2003. – No. 5.

4. Kirdina S. Institutional structure of modern Russia: evolutionary modernization // Questions of Economics. – 2004. – No. 10.

5. Kuzminov Ya. I. Course of institutional economics: institutions, networks, transaction costs, contracts. – M.: State University Higher School of Economics, 2006. – 442 p.

6. Lesnykh V., Popov E. Transaction costs in a transition economy // World Economy and International Relations. – 2006. – No. 3.

7. Lyasko A. Trust and transaction costs // Questions of Economics. – 2003. – No. 1.

8. Malakhov S. Transaction costs, economic growth and labor supply // Questions of Economics. – 2003. – No. 9.

9. Microeconomics: a practical approach: textbook / ed. Gryaznova A. G., Yudanova A. Yu. - M.: KNORUS, 2007. - 672 p.

10. Ovsienko Yu., Petrakov N. Russian transformation and its results // Questions of Economics. – 2004. – No. 5.

11. Chabanov V. E. Economy of the XXI century, or the third way of development. – S. – P., 2007. – 463 p.

12. Shamkhalov F.I. State and economy. Power and business. – M., 2005. – 358 p.

13. Shastitko A. E. External effects and transaction costs. – M., 1997. – 112 p.

Electronic resources:

1. http://www.ako.ru/press

2. http://www.ie.boom.ru

3. http://www.iet.ru

4. http://www.regnum.ru/news/economy

North D.K. Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. – M., 1997. – P.45

Coase R. Firm, market and law. – M., 1993. – P.6

The term “redistribution” denotes a type of economic relationship in which the movement of values ​​and rights to use them is mediated by the center.

S. Kirdina “Institutional structure of modern Russia: evolutionary modernization” // Issues of Economics. – 2004. - No. 10. – P.96

S. Kirdina “Institutional structure of modern Russia: evolutionary modernization” // Issues of Economics. – 2004. - No. 10. – P.97.

North D.K. Institutions and economic growth: a historical introduction. – M., 1993. – P.71.

Russia in numbers. Brief statistical collection. Goskomstat of Russia. – M, 1998.

Oleinik A. Institutional traps of the post-privatization period in Russia // Issues of Economics. – 2004. - No. 6. – P.79.

Popov E., Lesnykh V. Transaction costs in a transition economy // World Economy and International Relations. – 2006. - No. 3. – P.75.

Popov E., Lesnykh V. Transaction costs in a transition economy // World Economy and International Relations. – 2006. - No. 3. – P.76.

Barsukova S.Yu. Transaction costs of small business enterprises entering the market // Forecasting problems. – 2000. - No. 1. – P.110.

Ehrenberg R., Smith R. Modern labor economics: theory and public policy. – M., 1996. – P.223.

Malakhov S. Transaction costs, economic growth and labor supply // Issues of Economics. – 2003. - No. 9. – P.60.

Scientists have made many attempts to estimate the value of transaction costs. Some of the estimates concerned a single market (for example, G. Demsetz estimated the costs of exchanging shares for money on the New York Stock Exchange). Others are the economy as a whole.

Douglas North proposed to identify factors that influence the value of transaction costs. Among them

Market size: when relationships are personalized, costs

are decreasing. On the contrary, impersonal relationships require high costs for concluding contracts;

The need to measure goods to be exchanged;

The system of coercion as a reaction to the development of contractual

relations, but not perfect and unable to fully ensure coercion. Ideological attitudes and ideas of individuals.

To assess the value of transaction costs at the macroeconomic level, J. Wallis and D. North used the concept of the transaction sector (the most successful attempt to estimate the value of transaction costs). This sector included:

Wholesale and retail trade;

Insurance;

Banking sector;

Real estate transactions;

Management costs in unnamed industries;

State costs for judicial and law enforcement activities.

Based on this approach to defining the transaction sector, the value of transaction costs in the American economy was determined. According to calculations, the share of the transaction sector in the United States more than doubled - from 26% of GNP in 1870 to 55% in 1970.

Reasons for the expansion of the transaction sector:

1. The development of means of transport and communication, deepening specialization and division of labor led to the fact that exchange began to be impersonal, depersonalized. This required extensive use of legal experts.

2. Profitable use of expensive equipment requires mass production of products. Economies of scale are associated with an increase in average transaction costs. A large enterprise is associated with additional costs to ensure an uninterrupted supply of resources; coordination and control over the actions of people within the company; sales of manufactured products

3. Strengthening the role of government in its relations with the private sector.

Factors contributing to the growth of transaction costs in the Russian economy include:

Administrative barriers;

Low level of trust in the commitment of partners;

Unstable money circulation, opportunistic behavior;

Underdeveloped market infrastructure (communications, transport, insurance);

Destruction of the economic management system;

Severance of traditional economic ties;

Government policy (weak protection of property rights and

excessive interference in the regulation of market activity (the distorting effect of market forces, the creation of artificial barriers to entry and exit to markets).

Test questions and assignments

1. What is a transaction and who was the first to classify transactions? Name the various classifications of transaction types (according to D. Commons, according to O. Williamson, according to K. Polanyi).

The concept and meaning of a transaction.

Transaction is a human activity in the form of alienation and appropriation of property rights and freedoms accepted in society, which are carried out in the process of planning, monitoring the fulfillment of promises, as well as adaptation to unforeseen circumstances.

Freedom rights are considered as a separate category. In this case, the legal point of view is used. This is due to the fact that freedom rights do not belong to the category of property rights in the legal sense, even if we do not limit ourselves to the continental legal tradition and take into account the peculiarities of customary law. At the same time, within the framework of the new institutional economic theory, freedom rights may well be considered as a subtype of property rights. This is due to the emphasis on incentives in determining the meaning of rights to explain the actions of economic agents and the interaction between them regarding limited resources.

There is another aspect to the definition of a transaction. Institutions ensure the extension of the will of an individual beyond the area within which he can influence the environment directly through his actions, that is, beyond the scope of physical control. This distribution turns out to be transactions as opposed to individual action as such (stock) or exchange of goods.

When a transaction is considered, the restrictions, social background, or context in which they (the actions) are considered must be explicitly defined. Thus, the transaction turns out to be an action based on the interaction between people.

In economic theory, interaction between people is considered against the backdrop of such key assumptions as limited resources and following one's own interests. That is why the transaction contains in implicit form three moments, which at the same time are a reflection of three types of social relations: conflict, dependence and order16. First approximation conflict can be defined as a relationship of mutual exclusion regarding the use of a limited resource. Interdependence- an attitude reflecting a mutual understanding of the possibilities for improving well-being through interaction. Order- a relationship through which not only the total gain is determined, but also its distribution between interested parties.

The proposed definition of a transaction allows us to analyze various forms of economic activity within the same system of concepts. Thus, this definition is an element of general economic theory from the point of view of the possibilities of analyzing alternative and/or complementary economic systems.

The definition of a transaction and comments to it make it possible to formulate the sequence of further presentation. First, we need to consider the types of transactions. Secondly, to find out what determines the coexistence of different types of transactions and the process of replacing one type with another.

Types of transactions. The significance of the classification of transactions is that it shows the possibilities of comparative analysis of discrete institutional alternatives that mediate exchanges between economic agents. Discrete institutional alternatives are a set of systemically closed (indivisible, complementary) sets of rules that mediate interaction between people regarding limited goods.

One of the options for classifying transactions was proposed by J. Commons. He identified three types of transactions: trading, rationing and management17. As noted above, this section will only focus on pure types of transactions.

In a trade transaction to carry out the actual alienation and appropriation of property rights and freedoms, mutual consent of the parties is necessary, based on the economic interest of each of them in accordance with the relative bargaining power, legal status, etc. Thus, in this transaction, the condition for the appropriation of a good is the recognition by the counterparty of the presence the value in a thing is no less than that which the thing at his disposal has for him.

A trade transaction is the only form in which it is possible to comply with the conditions of symmetry of legal relations between counterparties.

Examples of transactional transactions include the actions of the employee and the employer (or their unions) in the labor market, the behavior of legislators in the political market, and the actions of the lender and borrower in the market for temporarily free funds. Each party independently accepts the final

16Commons John R. (1931), Institutional Economics, 21 American Economic Review, 656.

decision to participate in the exchange, although the latter may be asymmetrical if, say, disparate entrepreneurs are opposed by a strong trade union, or vice versa. From this point of view, the transaction of the transaction is carried out between parties that are equal in legal terms, but not necessarily equal in bargaining power, de facto.

However, in any case, the essence of a trade transaction is the exchange of property rights on the basis of a voluntary agreement between the exchanging parties, which is a consequence of the symmetry of the legal relations in which these economic agents find themselves. A legislator may vote in support of a project in which his interests are relatively weak, in exchange for similar support from another legislator for a project in which the first is interested. Thus, from the point of view of modern economic theory, logrolling, the essence of which comes down to support for one bill in exchange for support for another, is one of the forms of trade transactions in the political market.

In a control transaction the key is the management-subordination relationship, which involves such interaction between people when the right to make decisions belongs to only one party (due to delegation, usurpation, acquisition, etc.). This type of transaction exists in intra-company relations, in bureaucratic organizations, and, more broadly, in intra-hierarchical relations. Management transactions exist due to the fact that the right to make decisions (respectively, the right of freedom, according to J. Commons) is exchanged for income, the expected utility of which must exceed that corresponding to the market wage rate in the market. Due to this condition, labor contracts are radically different from other voluntary contracts, making it necessary to distinguish freedom as a special right.

Typical examples of management transactions are the behavior of a slave and a slave owner, a worker and a master, a superior and a subordinate in accordance with formal rules. In a management transaction, behavior is clearly asymmetrical, which is a consequence of the asymmetry of the legal status of the parties and, accordingly, the asymmetry of legal relations. The objects of the transaction are the rights to the goods exchanged. The object of the management transaction is the behavior of one of the parties to the legal relationship.

If the transaction corresponds to its concept, the slave owner, master or boss gives commands, thereby directly expressing their will, and the slaves, workers or subordinates carry them out, regardless of whether it coincides with their interests or not. Team- unilateral restriction of the set of permissible actions that slaves, workers and subordinates, etc. can take.

In this case, the differences between the types of commands are not significant. In terms of the problem of choice, this means that the procedure for evaluating alternatives as a means of selecting them is supplanted by constraints that leave only one alternative available. At least this is how the simplest version of a pure control transaction can be represented. In turn, the effectiveness of restrictions is determined by the effectiveness of the existing system of sanctioning behavior, which determines not only the structure of rewards and penalties, but also their intensity. Uncertainty

does not allow us to absolutely accurately specify a person’s actions, as well as to model mental procedures for their implementation for him, that is, to completely “program” him. And from this point of view, a real transaction is a combination of elements of pure types of transactions.

In the rationing transaction the asymmetry of the legal position of the parties remains, but the place of the managing party is taken by a collective body that performs the function of specifying rights. In particular, the preparation of the company's budget by the board of directors, as well as the federal budget by the government and the approval by the body of representative power, the decision of the arbitration court regarding a dispute arising between existing entities through which wealth is distributed, are rationing transactions. One party (board of directors, court) determines the rights of the other (heads of departments, plaintiff and defendant).

At the same time, there may be appeals from one party to the other, which may outwardly resemble negotiations: to prove the possibility of appropriation or the need to alienate a good, it is necessary to present sufficient grounds. However, only one party has the exclusive (formally) right to make the final decision. The rationing subject does not necessarily have the ability to determine the actions of the rationed (as happens in a control transaction).

In contrast to management transactions, applicants for the corresponding share of wealth play an active role in the implementation of freedom rights. In contrast to the transaction of a deal, negotiations are carried out in the form of putting forward arguments, filing a petition, and eloquence. Thus, the order of actions in management and rationing transactions of each party determines the characteristics of the result obtained.

The same operations can be mediated by different types of transactions, depending on the rules that regulate the relationships between economic agents. So, for example, if there are no restrictions on the level of interest charged by commercial banks, then the provision and receipt of credit is primarily a transactional transaction on both sides. Moreover, if a sufficiently large number of economic agents act on the demand and supply sides, then the resulting price will be perceived by each of them as something external.

If the state sets the maximum level of the interest rate and it turns out to be effective (below the potential equilibrium), then losses in the bank’s monetary income can be compensated by the opportunity to impose its will in decision-making, that is, to use a management transaction or to establish the rules that determine the rights of one or another. other category of borrowers. Thus, elements of a rationing (or management) transaction are “incorporated” into a transaction that, at first glance, is a transaction transaction.

When analyzing the relationship between a slave and a slave owner, a boss and a subordinate, the transaction of management is supplemented by the transaction of a deal, which allows us to talk about the existence of an, albeit implicit, contract. In fact, on

18 Ibid., 648–654.

In this approach to the analysis of intra-hierarchical relations within the framework of a forced (centrally managed) economy, the concept of the administrative market, the economics of coordination, was built, which was used to explain the organization of exchange within the framework of an economic system, formally characterized by a strictly centralized decision-making order.

Determining the content of a transaction and clarifying its relationship with the rules as key components of the institution make it possible to present one of the most interesting problems of modern economic theory - the problem of transaction costs.

The types of transactions considered make it possible to distinguish between the concepts of “transaction” and “exchange of goods”. The key to distinguishing between these two concepts is the abstraction from space and real time in which economic processes take place. Pure exchange is instantaneous and has no space-time component.

Strictly speaking, only a trade transaction is “similar” to the exchange of goods. The difference between a trade transaction and the exchange of goods becomes more obvious if they are separated not only in time (according to the principle of “legal control - future physical control”), but also in the nature of reproducibility. If a trade transaction is the appropriation of some rights through the alienation of others, then exchange presupposes a transaction in physical terms, that is, the movement of goods, the significance of which is expressed in the value of the rights to them. Futures transactions are the purest example of a transaction, in contrast to exchange, when only the right to acquire or sell a product in the future is sold and purchased, although the latter may not yet exist, for example grain (if the transaction is concluded in the spring of the N-ro year for the delivery of the corresponding batch of grain harvest N-ro year in the fall at a pre-agreed price).

When distinguishing between the exchange of goods and transactions, the double meaning of the concept of “good”, which J. Commons put into it19, can also be used - technological and proprietary (proprietary). In accordance with common sense, based on the direct perception of the interaction between economic agents, only a certain amount of good X is transferred from hand to hand in exchange for a certain amount of money M. Meanwhile, the most important moment of this process is double alienation and assignment of property rights. Thus, strictly speaking, it is not goods that are offered for purchase and sale of property rights, but not directly objects of property rights. Accordingly, the price of a good reflects not only its value based on physical characteristics, but also the value associated with a set of alienated and assigned rights. The formulated approach to the distinction between a trade transaction and the exchange of goods corresponds to the concept of a Buchanan product, which is defined as a pair consisting of an “ordinary” product (good) and a certain contractual form of its purchase or sale20.

19Commons, John R. (1950), The Economics and Collective Action, N.Y.: Macmillan, 44.

20Tambovtsev V.L. (2001a), Institutional market as a mechanism of institutional change// Social Sciences and Modernity, No. 5, p.34.

The ability to extract benefits from an exchange is influenced not only by the total value of transaction costs, but also by the distribution of their burden among the participants in the exchange. The efficiency of resource allocation depends not only on the general level of transaction costs and distribution between interested parties, but also on the structure determined by the directions of potential and actual agreements between economic agents.

Transaction costs are not the only component of production costs. Thus, it is necessary to determine the relationship between transaction and transformation costs.

Transaction costs: definition, conditions of occurrence, meaning. The first, most general definition that could be given is based on the definition of transaction:

transaction costs are the value of resources (money, time, labor, etc.) spent on planning, adaptation and ensuring control over the fulfillment of obligations undertaken by individuals in the process of alienation and appropriation of property rights and freedoms accepted in society.

Production costs, in accordance with the new institutional economic theory, consist of two parts - transformation costs associated with the change or reproduction of the physical characteristics of goods, and transaction costs reflecting the change or reproduction of “legal”, and more generally, institutional characteristics.

If we imagine the economy as a life support system, then transaction costs can be considered as the costs of operating the economic system. When defining the content of the concept of “transaction costs,” an analogy proposed by Kenneth Arrow is sometimes used: transaction costs in an economic system are similar to the phenomenon of friction in the world of physical objects. This analogy allows us to talk about the universal distribution of transaction costs.

The concept of transaction costs is of key importance in the new institutional theory, since institutions are explained not through the prism of a conflict of class interests, but from the point of view of the possibilities of saving on transaction costs.

To explain the phenomenon of transaction costs, two points are most significant: the discrepancy between the economic interests of agents interacting with each other and the phenomenon of uncertainty. Uncertainty is determined not only through the fragmentation (and, as a rule, distortion) of the information available to individuals, but also through the limited possibilities of processing it that they (the agents) have.

Considering the presence of two aspects in explaining transaction costs, they can be interpreted as the costs of coordinating the activities of economic agents and eliminating the distribution conflict between them. Since coordination is a key component of any organization, without taking into account transaction costs (explicitly or implicitly), economic analysis would be unproductive

The significance of transaction cost analysis will become clearer if we offer a historical illustration given by D. North:

“Trade, as the theory of international trade teaches us, has always promised benefits, but there were also obstacles that prevented this benefit from being realized. Moreover, if the only obstacle to the development of trade were transport costs, then there would be an inverse relationship between transport costs, on the one hand, and trade, exchange and the welfare of states, on the other. But let us remember that already at the dawn of our era, as the experience of the Roman Empire of the 1st–2nd centuries shows, it was possible to cover vast territories with trade ties, despite all the transport costs of that time, and with the decline of the Roman Empire, trade declined, and along with It, in all likelihood, decreased the well-being of society and individual social groups. And the reason was not that transport costs increased, but that with the expansion of the trading region, transaction costs increased, and holistic political systems capable of effectively protecting law and order and compliance with laws disappeared”21.

The lack of a direct connection between effective institutions and their existence, which is explained using transaction costs, is an important direction in the study of the evolution of institutions. It becomes possible to explain evolution as changes that depend both on the trajectory of previous development and on the imperfection of the feedback and selection mechanism, through which decision-makers learn, and the external environment determines the survival and development of the most “successful”, or rather, in the greatest the degree of adaptation, which, in turn, determine the course of further development.

This interpretation of transaction costs allows us to identify the relationship between them and institutions, and through them, between institutions and welfare. The dual basis of transaction costs is due, on the one hand, to the problem of coordination due to the existence of uncertainty, and, on the other hand, to the problem of distribution conflict due to the conflicting interests of economic agents in a world of limited resources. This circumstance indicates the possibility of an ambiguous relationship between them and institutions, since the interests of one group may lie, firstly, in increasing the level of uncertainty for others, and secondly, in gaining an advantage in power at the expense of others. The latter allows increasing the well-being of this group without increasing the size of the product release.

If transaction costs were zero, then, following the premises of the new institutional (and neoclassical) theory, resources would be allocated

21 North D. (1993a), Institutions and economic growth: a historical introduction// THESIS, vol. 1, issue. 2, p.70.

and would be used where they have the greatest value (if the income effect is not taken into account) regardless of the initial distribution of property rights among economic agents. In accordance with the premise of zero transaction costs, the interpreters of R. Coase formulated a theorem that bears his name. A shortened version of it can be presented in the following form: with zero transaction costs and income effect, as well as exogeneity of prices in relation to the actions of economic agents, the initial distribution of property rights does not affect the efficiency of their final allocation.

This is why, in neoclassical economics, institutions do not matter in terms of the efficiency (Pareto optimality) of the final allocation of resources. As a commentary on this definition, it is necessary to emphasize that R. Coase himself never spoke about a model of the world with zero transaction costs in a positive way. The term “Coase world” is misleading because it implies a model with zero transaction costs.

R. Coase's first work, which received worldwide recognition several decades later, “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), is based precisely on the premise of non-zero transaction costs. The formulated theorem is significant in the sense that it indirectly shows: positive transaction costs matter for various options for the initial distribution of property rights from the point of view of the efficiency of the final allocation of resources.

Taking this circumstance into account, firstly, we get the opportunity to explain the existence of various regimes of property rights (private, state, communal, free access) from a functional point of view, and not just from a moral and ethical point of view, which has both independent and derivative functional basis meaning. Secondly, accounting for transaction costs helps explain the comparative effectiveness of various methods of internalizing externalities as a way to fully take into account in the decision-making process the costs and benefits that arise as a result of their (decisions) implementation. Thirdly, it becomes possible to explain the emergence and limits of spread of various forms of institutional agreements, or institutional arrangements. Fourthly, the analysis of transaction costs is also important in the interpretation of institutional transformation, expressed, in particular, in the restructuring of property rights regimes, for example, in the transition from free access to private, state or communal property, changing the rules that form the institutional environment. In addition, with the help of this concept it is possible to determine the conditions of emergence and the relationship between various institutional agreements in economic history.

Transaction and transformation costs. Transaction costs are an element of production costs along with transformation costs, which are the object of analysis in traditional

onic neoclassical theory22.

There is not only complementarity of transaction and transformation costs, but also their substitutability. The proposed approach makes it possible to explain the existence of forms of economic activity or interaction between economic agents that do not ensure the minimization of average transformation costs in the long term (if we are talking about the competitive mode of functioning of the economic system), and vice versa.

Let's consider this issue in more detail. It is known that limited goods have a set of characteristics that can be divided into two groups: physical and legal. The first group includes such properties as size, shape, taste, color, smell, chemical composition, weight, location in space and time. The second group includes powers that constitute property rights.

Two types of characteristics of goods correspond to two functions: transformational and transactional, which allow them to be created and changed. A function is called transformational if its implementation is aimed at changing the physical properties of a thing. A function is considered transactional if the characteristics of a thing related to property rights change. Thus, the resources associated with the implementation of the transformation function form elements of transformation costs, and those resources, the use of which causes a change in the legal characteristics of a thing, form the transaction component of production costs.

A firm that produces software products or computers increases transformation costs by ensuring that its products are compatible with those of competitors. However, this significantly reduces transaction costs, since it makes it unnecessary for buyers to make specific investments with the corresponding classic problem of quasi-rent erosion due to the opportunistic behavior of ex post producers. As a result of the reduction in transaction costs, the market capacity expands, which allows the company to compensate for the increase in transformation costs.

Another example is based on a comparison of two types of exchange: personalized and impersonal. Within the framework of personalized exchange, due to the high degree

22 It should be noted that the definition of costs as transactional or transformational is not invariant with respect to the chosen reference point. For example, a buyer of an apartment, paying for the services of a real estate company, incurs transaction costs. They are the income of the real estate company. At the same time, real estate agents provide transformation services for a given company, which is reflected in the emergence of transformation costs. Thus, if we assume that this company operates in a competitive environment, in the long run its economic profit is zero, respectively, transformation costs are equal in magnitude to transaction costs. However, the problem is complicated by the fact that the real estate company itself also incurs transaction costs when purchasing transaction services, in particular, to ensure the security of its activities. Expenses under this item turn out to be the income of organizations that ensure the security of business activities and the protection of contracts. This chain can be continued. Here we also encounter the well-known problem of double counting, which requires determining the market value of the final transaction services.

nor the repetition of transactions with the same participants; deception, fraud, theft, violation of assumed obligations are either completely absent or poorly represented. Thus, direct, explicit transaction costs in such an exchange are low. At the same time, personalized exchange is possible within very narrow limits, which turns out to be an obstacle to the division of labor and specialization. In turn, specialization is a condition for reducing transformation costs. Consequently, in conditions of personalized exchange, total costs turn out to be high due to transformation costs. At the same time, impersonal exchange allows economic agents to produce with low transformation costs due to a radical expansion of the scale of specialization. However, as the one-move prisoners' dilemma game shows, the conditions of which are quite consistent with the conditions of depersonalized exchange, the equilibrium set of strategies will involve mutual deception, fraud, counterfeiting of goods, unscrupulousness, which in some cases requires the intervention of a third party.

It is the structure and dynamics of transaction costs (together with transformation costs and technology) that determine the forms of organization of economic activity, the content and nature of real transactions. This circumstance makes it possible to formulate a hypothesis according to which not only technology, but also institutions are a source of economic growth.

The properties of existing institutions have a significant impact on the characteristics of economic outcomes, as confirmed by research in which countries with high quality institutions were better off than countries with higher quality macroeconomic policies and a large stock of human capital, but low quality institutions.

It is often assumed that changes in technology affect the level of transformation costs, while institutional changes lead to an increase or decrease in transaction costs. However, there are at least two more forms of dependence that have been beyond the attention of researchers on the problem of transaction costs. Firstly, the impact of changes in technology on the level of transaction costs and, secondly, the impact of institutional changes on transformation costs. Including these dependencies in the analysis allows one to overcome the limitations of the naive version of the theory, according to which, given the state of technology, institutions are chosen that ensure the minimization of transaction costs. In parallel, this approach allows us to answer the question: do technological changes, which lead to a reduction in transformation costs, really lead to an increase in transaction costs and adapt to institutional changes?

According to K. Arrow, in the price system, transaction costs drive a wedge between the prices of sellers and prices of buyers and thereby lead to losses, causing damage to social welfare from the point of view of traditional economic theory. And from this position, transaction costs act like a tax. However, the distribution of the burden of transaction costs largely depends on the effectiveness of the strategic behavior of rivals.

anxious parties. However, taxes are sometimes included as one of the elements in transaction costs. In particular, this is possible if we assume that taxes are payment for transaction services provided by the state for the specification and protection of property rights.

So, transaction costs are an obstacle to mutually beneficial exchange. In this regard, the question arises about means that can reduce the level of transaction costs and ensure their distribution in such a way that voluntary exchange becomes possible. The variety of transaction costs also determines the variety of means to reduce these costs.

Opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange in conditions of positive transaction costs. In the previous paragraph, transaction costs were considered as an obstacle to mutually beneficial exchange, the realization of comparative advantages through specialization. In this section, we will show that in order to implement a voluntary mutually beneficial exchange and explain its scale, not only the absolute value of transaction costs is important, but also their distribution between interested parties. The analysis of this issue will be carried out based on determining the conditions and results of mutually beneficial exchange.

Let us recall that a mutually beneficial exchange is considered to be one in which both parties have the opportunity to increase their well-being. Within the framework of the “Edgeworth box” model, this is expressed in the transition to a higher indifference curve compared to the one to which the initial supply of goods corresponds to each of the exchange participants. The benefits from exchange can be represented not only in the form of a change in the level of utility, but also in the form of the quantity of one of the goods, which corresponds to the difference between two levels of utility: the corresponding level of the initial distribution of goods and the level that reflects the results of the exchange. We use the idea of ​​​​the possibility of expressing the benefit from exchange in the form of the quantity of a specific good or a composite good (money), assuming that the amount of gain for two individuals A and B is constant, does not change23 depending on the structure of the initial distribution of the stock of goods and is equal to: R = Ra + Re- These quantities of goods correspond to the maximum amount that exchange participants are willing to pay for its implementation.

We also use the following premises:

transaction costs are homogeneous (defined as the costs of exchanging property rights);

the absolute value of transaction costs is fixed and equal to C (units of good, with the help of which the benefits from voluntary exchange are measured).

The amount that each of the participants in the exchange must pay for the transaction is equal to Cd and Cb, respectively, with C = Cd + Cb. If through to

23 More consistent analysis shows that this is not the case. However, the resulting modifications do not add anything fundamentally new to the answer to the question of the distribution of transaction costs between the parties as a factor of mutually beneficial exchange.

designate the share of total transaction costs paid by individual A, then CA = kC and SB = (1-k)C, where 0< к < 1.

Due to the peculiarities of the premises used, only two options are possible from the point of view of the exchange: either it exists or it does not. This means that the scale of exchange is fixed if it differs from zero. Complicating the model is possible by weakening the premise of zero variable transaction costs, when the total amount of costs depends on the number of goods exchanged.

The first option is implemented when the relation is satisfied: Ra + Rb< С. Величина трансакционных издержек настолько высока, что не позволяет извлечь выгоды от добровольного обмена.

The second option can be implemented if: Ra + Rb> C. At the same time, this is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the exchange. In this regard, several situations should be considered, each of which corresponds to the condition indicated by the inequality:

The first three situations show that the distribution of transaction costs matters in terms of the possibilities for voluntary exchange. In the first situation, a sufficient condition for exchange is the following ratio: 1 - R&/C< k < Ra/C. Во второй ситуации достаточным условием является 0 < к < Ra/C. В третьей ситуации 1 - R&/C < к < 1. Только для четвертой ситуации распределение трансакционных издержек не имеет значения в плане возможностей осуществления обмена. Вместе с тем это не означает независимости распределения выгод обмена от величины трансакционных издержек, которые вынуждены нести участники.

The set of situations can be significantly reduced if we assume the possibility of subsequent compensation that will be paid by one participant in the exchange to another. At the same time, the benefits from compensation must exceed the costs associated with concluding and enforcing the relevant agreement.

The formulation of the problem in the proposed form is not accidental. When studying issues related to the specification of rights and the exchange of property rights, as a rule, attention is paid to the possibilities of reducing the overall level of transaction costs as a means of ensuring mutually beneficial exchange. The above example shows that the mechanism that distributes the burden of transaction costs between the participants in the exchange is of fundamental importance.

Up to this point, we assumed that the total value of transaction costs does not depend on their distribution between the participants in the exchange. This is a consequence of the implicit assumption of homogeneity of economic agents, due to the lack of specialization, sharing of information, and comparative advantage. Removing this restriction leads to the fact that the distribution of transaction costs between different participants in the exchange simultaneously determines a change in the total value of data from

derzhek. Thus, in our example, there is no longer an exogenously given value of transaction costs C. Instead, there is a certain value Cd* for the situation when the entire burden of transaction costs falls on individual A, and Cb* for the situation when the costs of exchanging property rights are financed for account B. An individual who has advantages in assessing the quality of a particular product, realizing this opportunity, thereby saves on general transaction costs. Let us assume that A has such an advantage. With some degree of approximation, the total value of transaction costs can be considered as a linear combination of costs for A and B: C* = aCA* + (1-a)SB*, where 0< а < 1. Таким образом, dC*/da < 0.

The exception is the situation when, despite savings on general transaction costs, the exchange will not take place precisely because their residual value will still be higher than the marginal estimate of benefits from the exchange, or Ra< aC*. В этом случае вновь необходимо обратить внимание на возможности компенсации ex post со стороны того участника обмена, который не обладает преимуществами в экономии на трансакционных издержках, но в то же время согласен выплатить компенсацию за создаваемый «специалистом» позитивный внешний эффект.

As an illustration, we can propose the standard “Edgeworth box” model, within which the potential benefits of exchange are determined, expressed in units of goods exchanged.

Figure 2.1. Edgeworth's box: mutual benefits of exchange and transaction costs

UAi,Ua2 - indifference curves of individual A; UEbUE2 - indifference curves of individual B; E - initial distribution of goods X and Y between A and B; AYa, AYE - the maximum possible mutual benefits of exchange, expressed in units of good Y; АХд, АХБ - the maximum possible mutual benefits of exchange, expressed in units of good X; CC - contract curve; K] is the final distribution of benefits, when all the benefits of the exchange are assigned to B; K^ is the final distribution of benefits, when all the benefits of the exchange are assigned to A.

If transaction costs are equal to zero, then regardless of how the benefits from the exchange should be distributed, the latter should be

and the final allocation of resources should be located on the QC contract curve. If transaction costs are greater than zero, then to determine the final allocation of goods it is necessary to take into account (a) the absolute value of transaction costs; (b) distribution of the burden of transaction costs between interested parties, (e) the total value of the benefits of exchange; (d) distribution of the benefits of the exchange (in units of Y or X, respectively).

No less important is the presence of comparative advantages in saving on various types of transaction costs, which means recognizing the importance of not only their heterogeneity and endogeneity.

Due to the fact that transaction costs are a central category in the new institutional economic theory, and also due to the existence of quite complex methodological problems associated with the formulation of the operational definition of transaction costs, this chapter will consider various variants of the typology, as well as consider in more detail certain types of transaction costs. costs These include: the costs of identifying alternatives, the costs of making calculations, the costs of measurement, the costs of concluding contracts, the costs of opportunistic behavior, the costs of specification and protection of property rights.

Costs of identifying alternatives. Due to the fact that uncertainty exists in any real economic system, as well as a moment of opposition in the economic interests of acting subjects, the universal distribution of transaction costs should also be recognized. At the same time, one of the fundamental aspects of the functioning of the economic system is individual choice, regardless of which economic system is the object of study. In turn, decision making involves a comparison of alternatives. However, alternatives are not initially given to the person. The decision maker. That is why their identification is the result of economic activity, since it is associated with costs.

In conditions of uncertainty, costs inevitably arise due to the search for the most favorable price (both on the part of buyers and on the part of sellers - for the transaction of the transaction), other terms of the contract, as well as the selection of potential counterparties (from the point of view of the reliability of the promises they make).

The existence of this type of transaction costs is determined primarily by the differentiation of prices for the same product, not due to differences in transport costs. The basis of such price differentiation is the phenomenon of uncertainty, which manifests itself in the fragmentation and heterogeneity of information that each economic agent receives.

A similar problem arises with potential counterparties, who also turn out to be heterogeneous.

It is the dispersion of prices for the same good (that is, within a relatively small region) that is one of the signs of market immaturity. From this point of view, the law of one price operates in its pure form when transaction costs are negligible or equal to zero.

As J. Stigler, one of the founders of the modern economic theory of information, noted:

“In all markets, prices change more or less frequently, and unless the market is completely centralized, no one will know all the prices currently being charged by the various sellers (or buyers). A buyer (or seller) who wants to determine the best price must interview different sellers (or buyers), a phenomenon I will call "searching."

In its simplest form, the search model can be represented by assuming that the only essential element of the contract is the price of the product. Suppose a buyer decides to purchase good X. Sellers of this good are distributed evenly taking into account existing prices (Pi = 8 and Pr = 6), so that the standard deviation is equal to one. The number of search units (number of sellers surveyed) must be determined to make a purchasing decision. It is known that the search is carried out under the condition of constant return and is expressed by the equation: TC = 0.0625N, where N is the number of surveyed sellers. To do this, you need to calculate the expected minimum price for each step. Since sellers are evenly distributed, the expected minimum price as a result of the first step will be equal to 7:

P*A) =/*1 + b-Ppi=0.5x8 + 0.5x6 = 7

At the second step, the probability that the minimum price will again be Pg = 8 is equal to p = 0.25. Accordingly, the expected minimum price will be equal to:

^min (2)= Р2Р, +(l - P2)= 0.25 x 8 + 0.75 x 6 = 6.5 For an N-ro step in the search, the expected minimum price will be equal to:

Respectively:

( The calculation results can be summarized in a table.

24 Stigler J. J. (1995), Economics of Information // Theory of the firm V.M. Galperin (ed.), St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, p. 507–508.

Table 2.1. Optimal search scale

Probability of Pi as minimum price

Probability of Pg as the minimum price

Expected minimum price

Marginal gain from search

Net marginal gain

from search

Thus, in our example, the optimal number of search steps is 5. However, it should be borne in mind that the consumer, when deciding on the number of sellers he surveyed, must be aware of the existence of different prices for the same product. Only the distribution between specific sellers is uncertain. Strictly speaking, the proposed illustration gives a highly simplified picture, since it is not difficult to estimate the magnitude of the marginal benefits obtained from searching. Meanwhile, in reality, one of the problems, which is called the “information paradox,” is that determining the optimal scale of search is quite difficult due to the difficulty of assessing ex ante the significance of the information received.

To minimize this type of costs, institutions such as specialized markets, in particular exchanges, as well as advertising and/or reputation are used. As for organized markets, cost savings are possible due to the concentration of supply and demand. As a result, the circulation of information accelerates and more intensive price equalization occurs. They represent the main product produced by the exchange.

Checking the reliability of the counterparty (as one of the moments of the search process) also requires time and resources. Thus, in order to receive a checkbook with a bank guarantee, a potential client will have to not only fill out a fairly detailed form in which he provides the bank with information about himself, including income, that is of interest to the bank, but also talk with an employee or head of a bank branch, provide a letter of recommendation, and also, if necessary, undergo a probationary period with a book without the right to overdraft.

To save on this type of transaction costs, reputation is also used (as a socially significant assessment of an economic agent from the point of view of business ethics, if we are talking about an entrepreneur), which, in turn, can be considered as an asset (possessing a certain value and, therefore, can be used, for example, as a contribution to the authorized capital or to foreclose on it). In particular, instruct-

In the example given, the bond turns out to be a form of collateral that should ensure the predictability of the client’s behavior in the future.

In connection with the above, it should be noted that reputation is closely related to the means of individualization of enterprises, in particular with brand names, trademarks, service marks and appellations of origin of goods. It is these tools that allow consumers to save on search costs. Considering the importance of means of individualization of enterprises, in particular trademarks, from the consumer’s perspective, W. Landes and R. Posner write:

“I don’t need to research the characteristics of the brand I’m considering buying because the trademark, in a succinct way, tells me that it’s the same brand that I liked before.”25

The stronger (recognizable, confirming the expectations of buyers during repeated purchases) the trademark is as a source of information, the greater the savings on search costs, the higher, other things being equal, the price that the seller can charge. Economic aspects related to the creation and protection of trademark rights, taking into account the interests of various groups of economic agents, both for a developed market economy and for the Russian economy, are considered in a study by the Bureau of Economic Analysis26

Measurement costs. Any good has many dimensions, since it has a complex of useful properties. Here is what D. North writes about this:

“The utility we obtain arises from the various properties of the product and service or, in the case of the activity of ... an agent, from the many individual operations that constitute its activity. This means... that when I consume orange juice, its benefit to me lies in the amount of juice I drink, the vitamin C content, the taste and aroma, even though the exchange I have made is simply paying two dollars for fourteen oranges. Likewise, when I buy a car, I get in return certain color, speed, styling, interior trim, legroom, gas mileage - all valued attributes, even though what I bought is only a car. When I buy the services of doctors, part of the purchase is their qualifications, their manner of treating patients and the time spent waiting in the waiting room. When, as the head of the economics department, I hire junior teachers, the object of hiring becomes not only the quantity and quality... of teaching and the output of scientific products... but also many other aspects of their work: do they prepare for classes, do they arrive on time, do they help colleagues , whether they participate in the life of the faculty, whether they abuse their power over students, whether they call friends in Hong Kong at the expense of the faculty... In order to assess these properties, it is necessary to expend resources; before-

25Landes, William M. and Posner, Richard A. (1987), Trademark Law: An Economic Perspective, 30 Journal of Law and Economics, 269.

26Shastitko A.E. (ed.) (2000), Transaction costs associated with the creation and use of property rights to trademarks in Russia, M.: TEIS, Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Additional resources are required to establish and evaluate the rights that are transferred in the exchange."21

Since there are two types of characteristics of goods - physical and legal, we can distinguish two types of measurement costs associated with the assessment of properties belonging to different types.

It is necessary to measure and/or evaluate the presence of these properties, which involves the cost of measuring equipment, time, as well as the use of surrogates (assessment of the quality of a product by physical properties, by price, according to the estimates of other agents) or intermediaries (including government ones according to the formal status): in the form of state trade inspection, consumer societies, appraisers, competitors, etc. In addition, knowledge of the rules, as well as technology for ensuring their compliance, is necessary in order to assess how great the expected usefulness of a thing is.

In connection with the definition of this type of transaction costs, three categories of benefits could be distinguished: researched, experienced and trusted.

Goods with prohibitively high costs of measuring quality before their acquisition (consumption) are called experienced. Goods with a relatively cheap procedure for preliminary determination of their quality are called “search”. The quality of the latter can be assessed relatively easily before purchase, while the quality of others can be assessed mainly during consumption. Credence goods are characterized by high costs of quality measurement both ex ante and ex post.

Let us note that the same good can be experienced in one situation and studied in another. In particular, the physical properties of a good, including divisibility, as well as technology and existing measurement rules can be of great importance. For example, if a buyer purchases one orange, then the measurement costs relative to its value are too high. However, if we assume that the oranges are standard, then when buying ten kilograms, you can eat one orange to evaluate the entire batch.

The trustworthiness of benefits is based on the difficulty of isolating a positive effect (or lack thereof) due to the complexity of the result obtained. Among the trust institutions there may well be institutions as goods, the coordination properties of which (allowing an increase in the well-being of each of the interested individuals) are not always clear even to specialists in the relevant field. From this point of view, the production of a given good does not necessarily lead to an unambiguous assessment of the correspondence of expected benefits to actual ones. Other examples include pharmaceutical drugs, especially the effects of which are extended over time and therefore are quite falsely identified.

When we are talking about organizing a market for an experimental durable good, a set of signals is of great importance, for example, warranty after-sales service, the possibility of replacing a defective product with a high-quality product of the same type within a certain period, etc... Warranty after-sales service is provided for the buyer function as a kind of insurance, which means for him a fee for transferring the risk to the seller. In turn, the insurance will be valid if the consumer complies with a certain set of requirements for the use of the benefit.

27 North D. (1997), Institutions, institutional change and economic performance, M.: Nachala, p.47.

Information about the properties of goods is distributed unevenly between counterparties, which is the content of the phenomenon of information asymmetry, which forces the party with relatively less information to bear relatively higher costs (through the use of experts, time costs, etc.) associated with restoring symmetry in possessing it.

In the historical aspect, the institutional response to the costs of measurement was a system of weights and measures, which ensured the comparability of various quantities of goods, greatly facilitating exchange. However, it (the system of weights and measures) can be interpreted more broadly, including, for example, a measure of economic success in the form of the maximum (or acceptable value) of economic profit, which is socially significant, although perceived individually by each economic agent. Thus, economic profit (and in monetary terms) as a target function, as a parameter of success, is also a kind of means of reducing the costs of measuring performance.

The use of profit as a measure of economic success can be considered as a result of the evolution of the very mechanism of selection of economic units that shapes the environment surrounding the enterprise. In addition, due to the variety of aspects of the functioning of a modern economic organization, as well as the presence of short-term and long-term aspects of activity, this criterion requires clarification. That is why in financial management, when assessing the state of an enterprise, a set of indicators is used.

Costs of entering into a contract. Since in conditions of uncertainty it is difficult to predict the development of events, contracts, on the one hand, are designed to give stability to relationships, but on the other, developing the terms of the contract and agreeing on them between the parties also requires resources and time.

The development of a contract containing promises involves the projection of the actions of the contract participants into the future. However, for this to happen, a formalized contract must contain codified information and also imply understanding (decoding) of the conditions specified in it. In addition, contract development requires preliminary communication.

To illustrate, we can list the constituent elements of a credit transaction between a bank and a client on the part of the bank: firstly, consideration of an application for a loan and conducting an interview with the client; secondly, studying the client’s creditworthiness and assessing the degree of risk based on documents accompanying the application (financial report, cash flow report, internal financial reports, financing forecast, tax returns, business plans); thirdly, preparation of loan proposals in the event of a fundamentally positive assessment of the application29; fourthly, it is necessary to document

28As for the conditions for maximizing profits in the long run, the use of this indicator depends on the method of specification and protection of property rights to the company, the market value of which is determined as a discounted stream of expected profits.

29 Due to the fact that these proposals may differ quite significantly from the borrower’s requests, there is a need for negotiations. Since the established price of the loan, terms, methods of repayment, and so on are subjects of bargaining, it is essential which of the bargaining participants has a comparative advantage in transfer

ment the loan and sign a loan agreement containing agreed terms on certificates and guarantees, loan characteristics, obligatory conditions, prohibitive conditions, determination of the situation of violation of the loan agreement, sanctions in case of violation of the agreement.

When considering the costs of contracting, it is necessary to take into account the properties of the transactions that they provide. In the economic theory of transaction costs, there are three key properties of transactions: frequency, level of uncertainty and asset specificity. If the level of uncertainty is low, as is the frequency of transaction repetition and the specificity of the asset, then developing a standard contract is not very difficult. Due to the standard nature of the contract, there are quite wide possibilities for using the state as an organization with comparative advantages in the implementation of violence, which at the same time, through the judicial system, allows controversial issues to be resolved.

It's a different matter when the level of uncertainty is high enough, as is the frequency of interaction. In this contract it is no longer possible to stipulate all the nuances of the relationship between the counterparties. Then a specialized system is required that determines who is responsible within the framework of a given relationship between economic agents (in particular, arbitration courts, industry associations, etc.). Finally, if transactions are characterized not only by continuity, but also by a high degree of specificity of assets, the contract not only cannot be complete, but a significant part of it becomes implicit. This is due to the fact that in conditions where the relationships between the parties are complex, their formalization may require significant costs, while the use of a legal mechanism to ensure their compliance is difficult or impossible due to the prohibitive high costs.

Among the ways to reduce the costs of concluding contracts, standard forms of contracts are sometimes used if the situations that are regulated with the help of these contracts are typical in terms of the mutual obligations of the parties. In addition, to reduce the costs of concluding a contract, a third party is used as a guarantor, which can partly compensate for the lack of trust of the parties to each other in the contract.

Costs of specification and protection of property rights. Since a good has many dimensions in terms of possible ways of using it, certain resources and time are required to clearly define the object and subject of property rights and the method of vesting them. A typical example is the determination of boundaries between neighboring states or garden plots. From this point of view, the costs associated with the settlement of border disputes (including the maintenance of armed units in the immediate vicinity of the border, the construction of fortified areas), as well as the cost of land surveyor services, should be

in dialects The key factor in obtaining these advantages is confidential information, which allows the owner to build a game on favorable terms. Accordingly, the extraction and/or preservation of confidential information also turns out to be an element of costs when preparing a contract.

categorized as transaction costs. The problem of specification of property rights, as well as delimitation of rights, arises almost everywhere if a system of interaction between people regarding limited resources is reproduced. In particular, determining the scope of competence within a company, household, or government agency is also associated with determining the subject-bearer of the right, the object, the set of actions that can be carried out in relation to this object, as well as the conditions for the delegation of this right.

To the extent that the activity of specifying property rights is subject to the law of diminishing marginal productivity, we can talk about some optimal level of their “erosion” (that is, the reproduction of a situation where it is not possible to ensure strict compliance with a particular legal regime). Thus, complete exclusivity in the exercise of one or another power is the exception rather than the rule.

It must be emphasized that here we are talking not only about the costs associated with the direct protection of property rights, an essential element of which are the costs of maintaining law enforcement agencies, but also partly about the costs in the field of education to the extent that they provide:

informing people about existing legal and social conventions of exchange;

the process of socialization, which determines the appropriate fulfillment of obligations (stipulated in the contract);

direct reduction of costs associated with differences in social, ethnic, cultural terms between groups in society, through a common language, history, cultural values. From this point of view, the problem that Western European countries face in connection with the flow of immigrants from “disadvantaged” regions becomes quite understandable. The point is not even that the number of potential violators of established rules is increasing, but that increasing heterogeneity of the population inevitably leads to increased costs of maintaining order and communication between different groups of the population.

A key factor in saving on the costs of enforcing rules, and in particular contracts, is ideology. Through the use of ideology, not only savings are made on the costs of decision-making, but also the internalization of norms30, so that they are carried out even if their violation goes unnoticed by others. The formation of a common field of interaction (in the form of a common language, culture, etc.) generates a positive network external effect, which significantly facilitates the exchange of activities between economic agents.

Costs of opportunistic behavior.Opportunistic can be considered behavior that is aimed at achieving the economic agent’s own goals and is not limited by moral considerations. The basis of opportunistic behavior is the divergence of economic interests, due to limited resources, undetermined

30 Interiorization of a norm is the process of transforming a limitation into an element of a system of preferences and values.

division and, as a consequence, imperfect specification of the terms of the contract. If the expected benefits associated with evading the terms of the contract turn out to be less than the benefits that it will bring, then this economic agent will choose one or another form of opportunistic behavior.

From the point of view of the contract process, there are two types of opportunistic behavior - pre-contractual and post-contractual.

A form of pre-contract opportunism is adverse selection, or worsening the conditions of exchange. It is characterized by properties of the external environment that are unfavorable for some economic agents, highlighting as potential partners those economic agents that are least desirable for the subject in question. This is a consequence of the existence of characteristics of goods hidden for the economic agent. An example is the used car market, or “lemons,” in which inferior cars displace better quality ones.

The essence of this model comes down to the following. Let's assume that there are 160 owners on the market, each of whom offers one car for sale. Demand is also represented by 160 buyers. Cars and, accordingly, owners are divided into three groups, in each of which the offer price is the same for all cars. The distribution of cars by category is presented in Table 2.2. In addition, the demand price for a car of a certain quality is the same for all buyers. Information asymmetry is manifested in the fact that each car owner is aware of its quality, while buyers have information about the share of cars of different qualities in the market, which correspond to the probability of purchasing a car of the corresponding quality.

Table 2.2. Lemon market

Share of cars

Ask price

Offer price

Potential gain for buyers and sellers

High quality

Medium quality

Low quality

If the information were complete and distributed symmetrically, then there would be three submarkets of cars, in each of which buyers and sellers would receive a total gain estimated at 400,000 rubles (the method of distribution of this gain does not matter here).

However, for a buyer purchasing a car, the amount he is willing to pay for it corresponds to the mathematical expectation of demand prices (assuming he is risk neutral): 0.5*50000 + 0.25*40000 + 0.25*30000 = 42500. Thus, the buyer is willing to pay 42500 rubles for a randomly selected car. This price will suit sellers of cars of average and worse quality. Better quality cars are being pushed out of this market.

However, even after this the situation is repeated for cars of average quality (now they have become “plums”, that is, cars of better quality). The mathematical expectation of the demand price is: 0.5*40000 + 0.5*30000 = 35000 rubles. This price turns out to be lower than what the owners of the plums would agree to. Thus, only cars remain on the market

of worse quality, and the total gain for buyers and sellers due to the fact that the market has narrowed to one category of cars will be 80,000 rubles. The lost winnings are equal to 320,000 rubles.

J. Akerlof characterizes this situation as follows:

“Bad cars drive out good cars because they both sell for the same price.” 31.

The lost gains create incentives for owners of higher-quality machines to produce signals that make those machines stand out from the crowd. If this fails, it can be assumed that the transaction costs associated with measuring quality are prohibitively high.

One option that drain owners can use is warranties. In our case, a seller of cars of the first category can offer a deal according to which, if during the use of a car it is discovered that its quality is poor (and in this model it is assumed that a used car is an “experimental” or “experienced” good, since the costs of measuring its quality before the start of operation by the new owner is prohibitively high), the buyer is paid a predetermined amount in the agreement. The lower the probability of a malfunction occurring, the lower the expected amount of payment under the warranty, and vice versa. This is why owners of lemons are not interested in giving guarantees.

Another illustration of the problem of adverse selection is provided by the labor market. If the wage rate is set by the company at the level of the average productivity of a worker in a particular specialty, then the most productive workers will refuse to enter into a contract on such terms, since they, having advantages in information about their abilities, value them higher.

Under conditions of complete certainty, the wages of a productive and unproductive worker correspond to their marginal product, that is, Wn = MCI; WH = MRN. In the event that the level of productivity of a particular employee is unknown, the wage rate will be uniform and correspond to the expected productivity of the employee W* = xMRp + (1- x)MRn. Thus, Wn>W*>WH.

In this case, existing measurement costs adversely affect both the welfare of the employer and the productive worker, since they narrow the area of ​​mutually beneficial exchange. On the contrary, unproductive workers are interested in the existence of this kind of asymmetry, since in this case they can receive a higher income than in conditions of complete certainty. It can be said that productive workers create positive externalities for unproductive workers, and the latter create negative externalities for productive workers and employers.

As a result, people are hired whose average productivity is lower than that for which the established wage rate is calculated. In this regard, using wages as a signal to potential employees is unlikely to be flawless in terms of selection effectiveness.

An institutional response to the existence of the problem of adverse selection in the labor market may be, firstly, the use of signals,

31 Akerlof J. (1994), The market for lemons: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism// THESIS,issue 5, p.92.

secondly, self-selection. Data on the education of a potential employee, including the educational institution from which the employee graduated, a system of private recommendations, as well as preliminary obtaining of information through a questionnaire and interview are used as signals.

Receiving an education indicates a certain level of an employee’s ability to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills. In this case, it is assumed that the educational institution whose diploma is considered as a signal has the necessary reputation. People are expected to forego investing in education if the opportunity cost of receiving it is too high relative to the wage differential.

To the extent that educational expenditures cause an increase in the marginal product of the worker, they are productive. However, due to the fact that it is often the fact of receiving education that matters, and not its content, the costs associated with the production of the signal can be considered unproductive.

It is important to note here that in order to explain the behavior of employees, the characteristics of educational institutions must be ranked according to a certain criterion, reflecting, in particular, the level of real requirements imposed on applicants and students, etc.... In turn, the latter can be summarized in the assessment of such an asset , as the reputation of the educational institution. In addition, the employment of graduates and their subsequent careers are essential. In other words, we are talking about the ranking of educational institutions in relevant specialties.

Written or oral recommendations are often of great importance in the selection process. This especially applies to the labor market, which is often characterized by informal connections and lack of standardization, which does not allow the use of publicly available information about a higher education institution as a reliable signal about the quality of the employee.

The signal system does not always make it possible to satisfactorily solve the problem of unfavorable selection; therefore, a self-selection system is used as a supplement to it. It can be built on the existence of a menu of contracts that shapes the expectations of potential employees and allows them to choose the form of agreement in accordance with their intertemporal preferences and abilities. For example, M. Aoki notes that in the Japanese labor market the principle of choice is widely used between initially higher wages without guarantees of long-term employment and further wage growth and initially low wages with certain long-term prospects for employment and higher wages:

“...the coexistence of labor contracts to perform relatively standard work together with contracts for entry into the hierarchy of ranks functions as a mechanism for “self-selection” of workers when solving the problem of optimal choice”^2.

A similar situation arises with the selection of insurance buyers in the insurance market. If health insurance services were provided to all categories of the population at the same price, the result would be that insurance companies would have to deal only with customers who are at the highest risk of illness, in particular the elderly. Institutional reaction

32 Aoki M. (1994), SPb.: Lenizdat, p. 110.

The response to the unfavorable properties of the environment on the part of insurance companies is the use of age, as well as the results of a medical examination as a signal, which is complemented by differentiation of insurance premiums.

Since a contract in economic theory is a process that consists of several stages, along with pre-contractual opportunism, that is, before the conclusion of a contract as a document, there is also post-contractual opportunism. Post-contract opportunistic behavior includes moral, or subjective, risk (moral hazard) (including in the form of shirking). It is expressed in the concealment of information by one of the parties, allowing them to benefit to the detriment of the other party. For example, using working time for one’s own purposes as free time by simulating vigorous activity is a means of hiding information about actual results. This form of post-contract opportunistic behavior is called “shirking.” Another example is the use of money received for the implementation of an investment project, for the construction of a mansion or transactions with securities. The following option is also possible: after concluding a contract, one of the parties, taking advantage of a favorable combination of circumstances and advantages in information, insists on changing the conditions that allow redistributing the gains from the exchange in its favor. In this case, another form of post-contract opportunistic behavior takes place - “extortion”, or blackmail (hold-up).

Let us consider in more detail the contractual relationship between the lender and the borrower. An important characteristic of these relationships is the impossibility of taking into account all circumstances in the future, especially when it comes to a long-term loan. This means that the contract cannot be comprehensive (due to the prohibitive costs of its development and conclusion). As a result, the economic interests of the lender and borrower are not fully aligned. Consequently, the requirement of incentive compatibility as a prerequisite for effective implementation of the contract is not met.

The institutional response to the possibility of post-contract opportunistic behavior by the borrower is control by the lender. As such a measure, credit monitoring is used by the bank as a lender. It can detect or prevent various forms of opportunistic behavior. For example, natural opportunism, according to Williamson, does not contain a conscious intention to violate the loan agreement. However, an analysis of the borrower's activities carried out by banking experts may show that in the future he will not be able to repay the loan. Another extreme form of opportunism is Machiavelli opportunism, which occurs immediately after the conclusion of a loan agreement, regardless of how the bank behaves. However, more common is, apparently, the strategic form of post-contract opportunism, which is based on the deliberate concealment of information and actions that are contrary to the terms of the contract, but caused by changed circumstances. That is why, to be on the safe side, the bank must invest in an information network to prevent the occurrence of problem and bad loans.

In connection with the last type of transaction costs, it should be noted that O. Williamson identifies three forms of selfish behavior: strong, semi-

strong and weak33. Opportunism refers to a strong form of selfish behavior, since it allows an economic agent to achieve its goal by incompletely providing the counterparty with information or distorting it, which is possible in conditions of asymmetry of the latter. Thus, opportunistic behavior is seen as following one's own interests, including through deception, which (deception) can take different forms. A semi-strong form of egoistic behavior is following one’s own interests in conditions of certainty. It is this form of behavior that was implicitly accepted in neoclassical theory (due to the equality of transaction costs to zero). Strictly speaking, neoclassical theory does not deny the existence of the problem of opportunism, since in recent decades models of choice and exchange based on subjective expected utility have been actively developed. This allows us to formalize the explanation of the process of formation of institutions, as exemplified by the addition at the end of this chapter devoted to the organization of the insurance market.

Finally, a weak form of orientation toward self-interest is “obedience,” which is possible primarily by identifying oneself with a certain community (family, company, state) of which the individual is a part.

In the economic literature, there are two approaches to the possibility of quantifying transaction costs: ordinalist and cardinalist. Most researchers within the framework of the new institutional economic theory use an ordinalist approach, explaining changes in the structure of transactions in an economy or industry, the replacement of intra-company transactions with market ones and vice versa, the emergence of hybrid forms of institutional agreements by changes in relative transaction costs.

At the same time, many attempts have been made to quantify transaction costs in the cardinalist version, that is, to obtain quantitative data that would show the value of transaction costs or their share in the gross national or gross domestic product, the share in the transaction price or as the amount of money (in including a monetary estimate of the time) necessary to complete the transaction.

Some of these assessments were made in relation to a single market, others - to the economy as a whole. In the first paragraph we will consider the problems of quantifying transaction costs within one market, and in the second - at the level of the economy as a whole.

33 Williamson O.I. (1993), Behavioral premises of modern economic analysis// THESIS, vol. 1, issue 3, pp.43–49; Williamson O.I. (1996), SPb.: Lenizdat, p. 97–101.

Transaction costs on the New York Stock Exchange. The choice of one of the fragments of the monetary sector of the economy as an object for quantitative assessment of transaction costs is in a certain sense logical, since it was within the framework of monetary theory that studies of transaction costs were presented quite widely before the tools of the new institutional economic theory were widely used in empirical studies.

The first attempt to quantify transaction costs in a single market was made by Harold Demsetz, which was reflected in his 1968 article “Transaction Costs”34. The object of analysis was the New York Stock Exchange (NSE) as a means of ensuring the rapid exchange of securities and, accordingly, ownership rights to real assets. On this basis, transaction costs were defined as the costs of using the NSE to quickly exchange shares for money.

X. Demsetz proposed to distinguish three elements in the composition of transaction costs: brokerage commissions, spread and transfer tax. However, in this article he suggests abstracting from taxes, since they complicate the analysis without affecting the conclusions. Apparently, this is also due to the fact that the taxes themselves are not directly related to the functioning of the exchange as such. In turn, commissions to brokers are set based on a collective decision of exchange members as a percentage of the share price. This is why the focus has been on spread shaping.

The spread arises due to the existence for a certain category of game participants of the need or desire to immediately sell or purchase shares in conditions where the search for a counterparty is associated with costs. There is then a gap between the price that a player would pay or receive if he was waiting for a trade (for example, during the day), and the price that he actually pays (receives) if the trade is carried out immediately (Figure 2.2). This situation can be reflected using a graph:

SS is the supply curve of sellers awaiting the sale of shares; S"S" - offer curve for immediate sale of shares; DD is the demand curve of buyers waiting to purchase shares; D"D" is the demand curve for buyers of shares with a zero waiting period; R*

34 Demsetz, Harold (1968), Cost of Transacting, 81 33–53.

Figure 2.2. Spread on the securities market

The share price established if each of its holders and potential buyers directly carried out a transaction when the costs of the latter were negligible; Рп - price for immediate purchase of shares; Rsch- immediate sale price of the share; (Рп - Р*) - buyer’s payment for refusing to wait (per one purchased share); (P*-Ppr) - the seller’s payment for refusing to wait (per one sold share); S = Р„- Ррр- spread.

In Figure 2.2, point Eо corresponds to equilibrium conditions when transaction costs are equal to zero. All transactions are completed instantly and without the cost of completing the transaction itself. Point Eo" corresponds to the equilibrium conditions when transaction costs are greater than zero, but each of the shareholders makes a transaction independently. Finally, points Ei and Er correspond to the equilibrium conditions for buyers and sellers, when the transaction time is negligible due to the use of intermediaries, but transaction costs (expressed as intermediary services) are positive.

Then S/ P = (Pp - Ppr)/ P, (where P is the average price) can be considered as the level of transaction costs when selling and purchasing shares. X. Demsetz notes that the spread is 40% of the total transaction costs, which, in turn, are estimated at approximately 1.3% of the share price of $48.

X. Demsetz put forward a hypothesis according to which the spread depends on four factors: the number of players (N) participating in trading on a given promotion; number of transactions (T); the number of markets (M) on which this security is traded; finally, its prices (P). It was supposed to check the dependencies expressed by the ratios: dS/dN<0; dS/dT<0; dS/dM<0; dS/dP>0. In other words, the more actively a security is traded, the smaller the spread should be; the more expensive the paper, the larger the spread (Fig. 2.3). The activity with which transactions occur regarding a particular stock is expressed in the number of participants in the transaction, the number of trading platforms on which this stock is quoted and, finally, the number of transactions that are made with this security.

This hypothesis can be illustrated using a graph also proposed by X. Demsetz.

X - shares for which trading is carried out on each of the submarkets; Si Si is the supply curve of sellers waiting for the sale of shares Xi; S"iS"i - supply curve for immediate sale of shares X i; D1D1 - demand curve of buyers waiting to purchase shares Xi; D"iD"i is the demand curve of buyers of shares Xi with a zero waiting period; S2S2 is the supply curve of sellers awaiting the sale of shares X2; S"2S"2 - offer curve for immediate sale of shares X2; D2D2 is the demand curve of buyers waiting to purchase X2 shares; D"2D"2 - demand curve for buyers of shares X2 with a zero waiting period; P* is the price of shares Xi and X2, established in the event that each of its holders and potential buyers would directly carry out a transaction when the costs of the latter are negligible; Р„1 - immediate sale price of share Xi; Р„р1 is the price for immediate purchase of shares Xi; X*i - equilibrium volume of transactions taking into account the spread for the first type of shares (pcs.); X*2 - equilibrium volume of transactions taking into account the spread for the second type of shares (pcs.); (Pni - P*) - buyer’s payment for refusing to wait (per one acquired share of Xi); (P*-Pnpi) - the seller’s payment for refusing to wait (per one sold share) when selling the Xx share; Ppg - the immediate sale price of the X2 share; Ppr2 - price for immediate purchase of shares; (Рпг-Р*) - buyer’s payment for refusing to wait (per one acquired share); (Р*- Ршй) - the seller’s payment for refusing to wait (per one sold share) when selling share X2.

X. Demsetz gives a fairly simple explanation for this phenomenon. The more actively a particular stock is traded, the greater the economies of scale of operations, expressed in a decrease in the average value of transaction costs, or

costs per share. Significant potential for economies of scale is usually associated with the emergence of a natural monopoly, which makes it possible to extract economic profits in the long term. However, in this case, competition between different groups of players kept the spread at a level close to transaction costs.

Figure 2.3. Economies of scale and spread in the stock market

R

This analysis was carried out on a random sample consisting of two hundred types of company shares. Observations were carried out over two days, with a break between them of one month.

Estimation of transaction costs in the US economy. The first attempt to systematically assess transaction costs in the economy as a whole was made by D. North and J. Wallis. Its results were reflected in the article “Measuring the transaction sector in the American economy in 1870–1970”35. To this day, this work by D. North and J. Wallis remains relevant, despite the abundance of literature on transaction costs. The presentation in this section is based on the content of this article.

In order to assess the significance of the research conducted and understand the limits of their application, it is necessary to focus on the methodology of quantitative assessment, which is directly related to the definition of the concept of transaction costs, which is used by D. North and J. Wallis as a working one.

The certainty of transaction costs and their empirical prototype is presented through the analysis of four types of relationships and the corresponding activities:

35 Wallis, John J. and North, Douglass S (1986), Measuring the Transaction Sector in the American Economy, 1870–1970, in

a) the relationship between individual buyers and sellers;

b) intra-company relations;

c) production of services by intermediary firms of various types;

d) relations related to the protection of property rights.

A. TRANSACTION COSTS FOR INDIVIDUAL BUYERS AND SELLERS

The proposed list indicates that transaction costs are ubiquitous, associated with all types of behavior that involve interaction between economic agents36.

Consider the transaction costs that arise when buying and selling a home. First, let's find out how this problem looks from the buyer's side. Transaction costs include:

time to inspect the house (the value of which is determined through the opportunity costs of using time);

costs of obtaining information about prices and other options for purchasing a home;

investments in reputation as a necessary condition for demonstrating reliability for the counterparty (which in game theory is known as the reliability of promises);

attorney fees;

notary fees;

payment of a deposit in case of agreement to purchase a house, etc.

It should be noted that a problem arises here due to the emergence of secondary transactions, when, for example, the buyer hires a lawyer, who, in turn, uses the services of a security guard, secretary, or assistant. This is why the definition of transaction costs is relative. In this case, the cost of a lawyer is an element of the transaction costs of buying a house.

When selling a house, transaction costs include those costs that would not have to be borne if the seller sold it to himself. It is the value of the right to use and own a house that are the opportunity costs of its sale. Transaction costs of selling a home include: 1) hiring a real estate agent, 2) advertising costs, 3) costs associated with proving the counterparty's credibility (reputation), 4) time spent showing the house to potential buyers, 5) title insurance property.

36 In connection with the question of the limits of distribution of transaction costs, it should be noted that there are several possible answers. Firstly, the presence of transaction costs is typical only for a market economy and when carrying out market transactions. Second, transaction costs exist everywhere in a market economy. Finally, thirdly, transaction costs arise in any type of economy where there is an exchange of activities, problems of coordinating the actions of economic agents and distribution conflicts.

When analyzing a transaction to buy a house, we are faced with a situation where transaction costs are divided in terms of the possibilities of their quantitative assessment. As already noted, transaction costs corresponding to the value of the services of lawyers and realtors are relatively easy to evaluate. Estimating the time it takes to inspect a house by the buyer and the corresponding time spent by sellers, partly the costs of creating their reputation, can be carried out with great difficulty through determining the amount of opportunity costs.

The visible, observable and measurable elements of transaction costs will be called transaction services.

In addition to this, it should be noted that we are talking about transaction services in the legal sector of the economy. Thus, transaction services in the shadow economy also remain outside the scope of this quantitative assessment model. The relationship between various types of costs in connection with the problem of their measurement can be presented in the following form:

Figure 2.4. The relationship between costs of different types

TRANSACTION COSTS

Non-market transaction costs

Cost of transaction services

Unmeasured transaction costs

Measurable transaction costs

This approach is fully consistent with that adopted in the system of national accounts. Moreover, it is quite possible to separate out both intermediate and final transaction services, which turns out to be necessary to avoid double counting.

B. IN-HOUSE TRANSACTION SERVICES

Moving from the analysis of transaction costs in connection with the behavior of individual economic agents (buyers and sellers) to their analysis in connection with the behavior of groups, it should be noted that along with the general moments when the company acts as one of the market subjects, specific ones also arise when we consider transaction costs in connection with intra-company relations, implementation of intra-company transactions.

Two options for estimating transaction costs are proposed.

1. The first way is to consider the network of contracts as a certain sequence within a certain hierarchical structure: between the owners of the company (proprietors) and managers, managers and controllers (supervisors), controllers and workers. As an example, consider Ford, which hires accountants, lawyers, and secretaries to coordinate, direct, and oversee its exchanges with managers. Managers also incur associated costs that would not exist if Ford produced cars for itself. Further, managers use a similar set of services to carry out exchanges with controllers, etc.

It should only be noted that the structure of transaction costs varies depending on the level at which contracts are considered. The higher he is,

the more significant the share of costs of obtaining, processing and providing information. The lower this level, the higher the share of costs associated with monitoring the implementation of employment contracts.

2. The second method involves a simpler scheme: Ford (or shareholders) enter into contracts directly with direct car manufacturers, that is, those who themselves participate in the process of transforming resources into a product. Then all the costs associated with maintaining people in intermediate positions in the hierarchy (foremen, inspectors, controllers, clerks, managers) constitute that part of production costs that cannot be transferred to direct producers, and this is precisely an essential characteristic of transaction costs. Thus, all these intermediate links are used to coordinate, direct and control exchanges with those who directly ensure the delivery of transformation services. Sometimes the costs associated with performing these activities are defined as management costs or bureaucratic costs.

Regardless of the choice of scheme for quantitative assessment of the transaction sector within firms, it is necessary, according to D. North and J. Wallis, to fulfill two conditions:

3. Identification of professions that are directly related to the performance of transactional functions:

a) acquisition of resources;

b) distribution of the product produced;

c) coordination and control over the implementation of transformation functions.

4. Determining the amount of transaction costs through calculating the wages of those employed in the intra-company transaction sector.

B. Transaction industries

There is a special category of firms whose main activities are related to the provision of transaction services. Thus, if transformational resource services are used as part of their activities, at the level of the economy as a whole they are still assessed as part of transaction costs. This category of firms includes intermediaries. However, it is possible to propose a more precise specification of industries in which firms providing pure transaction services or primarily transaction services are grouped.

The so-called transaction industries include the following groups of firms:

Finance and real estate transactions. The main function of these firms is to ensure the transfer of property rights, including the search for alternatives, preparation and implementation of transactions.

Banking and insurance. The main function is the mediation of exchanges that depend on specific circumstances and requirements (uncertain, asynchronous in time and not corresponding in quantity and size), as well as reducing the costs associated with the security of the implementation of property rights to the relevant resources. In particular, one of the most important types of insurance when carrying out a transaction is title insurance, for example, for land.

It was already noted above that the chosen starting point for classifying costs into transaction and transformation is of fundamental importance. The banking sector can be used as an example of the non-invariance of the classification of production costs. The income that the banking sector receives for carrying out settlement operations, as well as mobilizing and placing temporarily free funds, is a measure of transaction costs, since banks ensure coordination of plans and actions of economic agents for saving and investing, on the one hand, and mutual settlements - with another.

However, as soon as we look at this situation from the bank’s perspective, it turns out that the part of the income that should go to cover costs corresponds to the transformation costs necessary to provide services to clients. Thus, transaction costs for one economic agent are a source of covering the transformation costs of another. In this case, not only the functional purpose of certain resources matters, but also the context in which their use is considered. Thus, here we are again faced with a special case of the double counting problem.

3. Legal (legal) services. The main function of the relevant organizations is to ensure coordination, direction and control of the implementation of contract terms. Since the existing institutional environment is quite complex, which results in significant difficulties in taking into account the various regulations37 related to the activities of the company, lawyers are hired to save on the costs of using the existing system of rules.

With regard to the qualification of transport as a transactional or transformational industry and, accordingly, transportation as a transactional or transformational service, the method of defining the good is of decisive importance. If a thing is defined as a good taking into account the place where its consumption will occur, then transport costs cannot be attributed to the transaction element. In particular, if materials are purchased for the construction of a country house, then these materials in the store and at the construction site are different benefits. This moment expresses the principle of complementarity of characteristics that make a thing good.

4. Wholesale and retail trade. The issue of wholesale and retail trade, which includes both transaction and transformation services, turns out to be more complex. The latter could include, for example, storage of goods, which is similar to transportation, only not in space, but in time. Our task does not include a special discussion of this issue, therefore, following the proposal of D. North and J. Wallis, we will classify wholesale and retail trade services as transactional.

37 Additional difficulties in using the existing system of rules are due to their possible inconsistency. It makes the need for specialized legal services even more urgent.

results of quantitative assessment of transaction services in US economy. Based on the formulated methodology for quantitative assessment of transaction costs, D. North and J. Wallis carried out measurements of their level in the private and public sectors of the US economy.

The dynamics of the level of transaction costs in the private sector in relation to GNP in the corresponding year is as follows:

Quantitative estimates based on the proposed methodology indicate the rapid development of the private transaction sector: over a hundred years, its share in GNP has increased by more than 18 percentage points. It should be noted that the relative growth of the transaction sector turned out to be quite stable, with the exception of the last decade (60s), when stabilization began.

To determine the size of the public, or state, transaction sector, D. North and J. Wallis proposed two options, according to which we can obtain the maximum values ​​of estimates: maximum and minimum

Table 2.3. Private

US transaction sector b

Wow from BHlf*

Based on the data obtained, we can conclude that the transaction sector in the US economy has expanded over the course of the century both in accordance with the option in which some government services are transactional and in accordance with the option in which all government services are non-transactional . In the first case, its share increased by more than 28 percentage points, and in the second - by 22. What is the reason for such a rapid expansion of the transaction sector?

38 Wallis, John J. and North, Douglass S (1986), Measuring the Transaction Sector in the American Economy, 1870–1970, in Long-term factors in American Economic Growth, Stanley Engermann and Robert Gallman (eds.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 121.

Table 2.4. Transaction sector, % from VNP39

Years

First option

Change in percentage points according to the first option

Second option

Change in percentage points according to the second option

Developing the idea of ​​the reasons for the expansion of the transaction sector, there are three main factors:

1. The importance of the costs of specification and protection of contracts has increased significantly, since as a result of increased specialization and urbanization, exchange has become increasingly impersonal and depersonalized, which requires the widespread use of legal specialists. The most important factor that determined the growth of this form of exchange was the development of material infrastructure, in particular transport and communications, which significantly expanded the range of possible exchange alternatives and, accordingly, led to an increase in the overall costs of receiving and processing information.

In addition, urbanization has led to the concentration of economic activity in space and the relative expansion of the real boundaries of the activities of economic agents, which has strengthened the element of interdependence. The latter, in turn, has as one of its consequences the emergence of numerous monetary, technological and consumer externalities. The arguments for the production functions of some producers of goods and services are the results of the economic activities of others in the form of volumes of goods and services produced. The same goes for the functions of income (for monetary externalities) and utility (for consumer externalities). This problem leads to an increase in the importance of the specification of property rights and their protection. In turn, the increasing importance of the distinction between property rights and their specialized protection is causing an increase in demand for legal services.

2. The second important factor was technological change. Capital-intensive technologies can be used profitably if they can ensure a consistently high level of product output, that is, realize economies of scale. However, this requires ensuring a rhythmic, uninterrupted supply of resources, firstly; creation of a system

Ibid., 121.

we, providing coordination and control over the actions of people within the company, secondly, and the creation of an established system for inventory management and sales of manufactured products, thirdly. These factors, together with changes in the level of transport costs, made it possible and necessary for the development of large forms of economic organizations with a complex system of intra-company specialization, division of labor and, accordingly, transactions mediating its reproduction. At the same time, the listed three components correspond to the three types of intra-company transaction functions in the transformational private sector of the economy, identified by D. North and J. Wallis. Thus, economies of scale, other things being equal, are associated with an increase in average transaction costs (Fig. 2.5).

Interpreting the changes that have occurred, they can be presented in the form of a picture, which is built on the basis of assumptions made by the same authors.

Figure 2.5. Average transaction costs and the optimal number of transactions when changing transformation technology

with H*N

N is the number of transactions, which determines the size of the company; T - transformation technology; I is a parameter that determines the characteristics of the institution; DtDt - implicit demand curve for transactions; StSt - implicit transaction supply curve; Dt"Dt" - implicit demand curve for intra-company transactions after changes in transformation technology

Technological changes lead to an increase in the marginal product of transformational resources. This means that the same number of transactions can be carried out without damage at higher average transaction costs, on the one hand, or allows an increase in the number of transactions at the same level of average transaction costs, on the other hand, which is equivalent to an increase in the size of the firm. As a result, as shown in Figure 19, the total value of intra-company transaction costs will increase from ATCi*Ni to ATC2*N2.

There is another aspect to this problem. Technological changes in one industry can lead to an increase in the marginal product of transaction resources in another industry and, accordingly, a decrease in average transaction costs.

derzhek40. The same result can be obtained due to institutional changes. In particular, the emergence and development of a system of rules that ensure the structuring of relationships between economic agents in limited liability organizations significantly facilitates the increase in the scale of the company. If average transaction costs within a firm decrease, then, in accordance with the principle of determining the size of a firm, which was formulated by R. Coase, the number of transactions within it should increase4. (see Fig. 2.6).

Figure 2.6. Average transaction costs and the optimal volume of intra-company transactions during institutional changes

ATC - average transaction costs; N - number of transactions; DtDt is the firm’s implicit demand curve for transactions; StSt - implicit transaction supply curve; St"St" - the implicit transaction supply curve obtained as a result of institutional changes

In this case, an increase in the size of a firm is not necessarily associated with an increase in the intra-firm transaction sector, since the elasticity of implicit demand for transaction services in absolute value may be less than one.

3. Reducing the costs of using the political system to redistribute property rights. This decline was due, from the point of view of D. North and J. Wallis, to a change in the system of rules for the production of rules: major decisions had to be made through legislative commissions, which made it much easier for various economic interest groups to exert pressure to make decisions that benefited them.

Taking into account the identified factors of changes in the size of transaction services in the US economy, as well as the features of the methodology for their assessment, we can conclude that the sources of dynamics in the size of the transaction sector turn out to be heterogeneous.

40Here we are talking about costs per transaction.

41North, Douglass S. and Wallis, John J. (1994), Integration Institutional Change in Economic History.A Transaction Cost Approach, 150 Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 609–624.

The expansion of the transaction sector can occur due to changes in the structure of transactions: an increase in the market share. Other things being equal, this means that the overall level of transaction costs may remain the same. This suggests that measuring it by the value of transaction services is only a certain degree of approximation.

If the price elasticity of demand for transaction services is greater than one, then the expansion of the transaction sector can occur even with a decreasing price of transaction services.

The elements of production costs are transaction and transformation costs. We already mentioned above that they can be considered as substitutes. Then a situation is possible where, as average production costs decrease, total transaction costs increase, if transformation costs decrease to a greater extent.

Institutional changes in one sector of the economy (for example, the formation of an organized bond market with its own rules of the game) can significantly affect the situation in another sector. On the one hand, this is a new source of borrowed funds. But on the other hand, as happened in Russia, there is a factor of underinvestment in the real sector of the economy, since this market was focused mainly on transactions with government securities.

The rise in cost of the exchange process, due to the ineffective distribution of property rights, which is carried out by the state. This becomes possible because the economic interests of the agents making political decisions contradict the conditions for ensuring the efficient allocation of resources. At the same time, actions taken by individuals in accordance with the interests of a particular group are not associated with significant costs. In particular, this is due to the imperfection of the political market as a consequence of the inability to accurately assess the performance of a particular politician and the compliance of actions with the promises made to voters.

The rapid growth in the variety of goods, along with the complication of a significant part of them, causes an increase in difficulties associated with measuring the beneficial properties of goods according to various parameters and their further ordering, which is necessary for assessing the benefit as a whole.

Consequently, taking into account the last two points, the dynamics of the transaction sector cannot be considered as a uniquely positive or negative factor of economic growth and, accordingly, the development of a system of specialization and division of labor. The basis of this ambiguity lies, on the one hand, in the distributional aspect of interactions between economic agents, corresponding to the dual nature of institutions, and, on the other hand, in the peculiarities of the assessment methodology. So, to the extent that transaction costs turn out to be an exogenous or endogenous variable relative to institutions, there is not enough basis for drawing conclusions regarding the real dynamics of the latter in terms of Pareto optimality or Pareto improvements. The identification problem must first be resolved.

This duality is manifested in the special role of the state, which can reduce the level of transaction costs through the specification and protection of property rights, and can, on the contrary, increase their level, being an obstacle

for economic growth through the creation of favorable conditions for the distribution activities of organizations

This chapter examined such fundamental concepts for the new institutional economic theory as transaction and transaction costs.

It was shown that any transaction has a rather complex internal structure and differs from a simple exchange of goods. Transactions are diverse, reflecting the variety of forms of organization of economic activity. We examined the main characteristics of the pure types of transactions identified by Commons: trading transactions, management and rationing transactions.

The operationalization of the concept of transaction and institution occurs through the inclusion of the concept of transaction costs in the systematic analysis. This chapter has shown that there are different approaches to defining this concept, but in any case, transaction costs have a great influence on the efficiency of resource allocation and economic development.

It should be especially noted that the thesis that transaction costs hinder economic development are unproductive is incorrect if we assume a sufficient degree of realism in the analysis. This thesis, at first glance, has the right to exist only if we compare two situations: with zero and positive transaction costs.

Of fundamental importance is not only and not so much the level of transaction costs, but their structure, distribution between participants in economic exchange, which, in turn, reflects the specific configuration of institutions.

Trust benefits

Costs of identifying alternatives

Costs of entering into a contract

Measurement costs

Costs of opportunistic behavior

Costs of specification and protection of property rights

Research benefits

Experienced benefits

Trade transaction

Transaction

Rationing transaction

Control transaction

Transaction costs

Transformation costs

How does a transaction differ from the exchange of goods (services)?

What is the form of transaction in which it is possible to comply with the conditions of symmetry of legal relations between counterparties?

What are the features of a trade transaction as opposed to a management transaction?

What are the features of a management transaction as opposed to transactionization?

What are the features of a rationing transaction from a trade transaction?

What is a “Buchanan product”?

What type of characteristics of goods corresponds to the transformation function?

What type of characteristics of goods does the transaction function correspond to?

Can the distribution of transaction costs between exchange participants affect the overall value of these costs?

Name the main institutions used to minimize the costs of identifying alternatives.

How do researched, experienced, and trust goods differ from each other?

Name the main ways to reduce contracting costs.

Which form of opportunistic behavior (pre-contractual or post-contractual) is worsening selection?

Which form of opportunistic behavior (pre-contractual or post-contractual) is moral hazard?

Which form of opportunistic behavior (pre-contractual or post-contractual) is shirking?

Which form of opportunistic behavior (pre-contractual or post-contractual) is extortion?

What factors, according to Wallis and North, determined the expansion of the transaction sector of the American economy in the twentieth century?

1. “If the total value of transaction costs due to the corresponding rules of exchange is minimal, then its participants can extract the maximum possible benefit from it.” Comment on this judgment.

Explain why the listed types of transaction costs cannot be considered as a way to classify them.

List the main factors influencing the level of transaction costs on the New York Stock Exchange in accordance with the Dem-setz hypothesis. Explain the direction of action of each of these factors.

“The increase in the share of the transaction sector in GNP is a consequence of a decrease in the efficiency of the economy.” Comment on this judgment.

Main

Akerlof J. (1994), The market for lemons: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism// THESIS,issue 5, p. 91–104.

Williamson O.I. (1996), Economic institutions of capitalism. Firms, markets, “relational” contracting, SPb.: Lenizdat, p. 97–101.

Additional

Aoki M. (1994), Firm in the Japanese economy. Information, promotion and deal-making in the Japanese economy, SPb.: Lenizdat.

Williamson O.I. (1993), Behavioral premises of modern economic analysis// THESIS, vol. 1, issue. 3, p. 39–49.

Commons, John R. (1931), Institutional Economics, 21 American Economic Review, 648–657.

Demsetz, Harold (1968), Cost of Transacting, 81 Quarterly Journal of Economics, 33–53.

Wallis, John J. and North, Douglass S (1986), Measuring the Transaction Sector in the American Economy, 1870–1970, in Long-term factors in American Economic Growth, Stanley Engermann and Robert Gallman (eds.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 95-161.

Introduction

Chapter 1 An institutional approach to defining and classifying contracts, firms, and transaction costs

1.1 Market transformations and the formation of contractual relations 14

1.2 Transaction costs; classification, measurement 32

1.3 Neo-institutional interpretation of the company taking into account modern Russian characteristics

Chapter 2 Factors influencing the value of transaction costs 78

2.1 Institutional environment as a factor in the dynamics of enterprise transaction costs

2.2 The state in creating the conditions for minimizing transaction costs

2.3 Corruption and administrative barriers as a source of transaction costs

Chapter 3 Approaches to measuring transaction costs 132

3.1 Analysis of enterprise expenses in terms of identifying transaction costs

3.2 Features of identifying transaction costs in enterprise accounting data

3.3 Empirical studies of transaction costs of Russian enterprises

Conclusion 164

List of used literature 170

Applications 183

Introduction to the work

Relevance of the dissertation research topic. After the initial stage of reforms, the modern economic system of Russia entered a new phase of development. The basis of the economic model under construction is the contractual relations of economic agents that arise in the process of commodity exchange. The development of specialization and expansion of the exchange framework are among the fundamental factors of the country's economic growth and the well-being of the nation. At the same time, the exchange process itself involves financial, time, intellectual and other costs for its implementation - transaction costs. The transitional state of the economy presupposes an increase in the influence of traditional factors in the magnitude of transaction costs and the emergence of new sources. Today, when the external environment of activity of an individual company, the main element of the modern economy, has become less favorable, and the regulatory influence of the state has become more stringent, the role of the scientific approach in solving pressing problems of the influence of transaction costs on its activities is increasing sharply. At the same time, the search for economic methods that make it possible to identify their quantitative parameters as accurately as possible is of particular importance, since the traditional accounting approach used does not fully reflect the range of production and sales costs and leads to significant distortions.

The problem of transaction costs is especially relevant for domestic economic science. The state of high stability of the developed markets of the USA and Western Europe creates less effective incentives for the development of the theory of transaction costs than the unstable state of the Russian market, the unevenness of its development process, the underdevelopment of the institutional environment, the legal field and its mechanisms, and the uncertainty of the specification of property rights. Therefore, domestic science is faced with the task of critically analyzing the standard assumptions used in traditional models of foreign

institutional economics, and the development of new solutions that can take into account the specific conditions of the modern Russian market that arise in the process of its formation.

The fundamental foundations of neo-institutional economics were laid by the works of A. Alchiyan and G. Demsets 1, R. Coase 2 and D. North 3. The development of institutional theory at the present stage is carried out by a group of foreign scientists, in particular: O. Williamson, K. Menard, T. Eggertsson, M. Jensen, W. Meckling, P. Milgrom, J. Roberts, P. Joskow and others.

However, the models developed within the framework of institutional theory do not take into account the many features of a transition economy and possible variants of emphasis in the theory. The desire to minimize the risk of improper application of theories based on sustainable economic systems, protection from which is not provided by traditional methods, gives rise to the need to develop alternative models of behavior of economic agents in a transition economy, or at least adjust existing ones.

Despite the rich scientific heritage accumulated by many foreign economists, supporters of the institutional paradigm in the field of transaction costs, the first steps towards a theoretical solution to this problem in the context of transformation of the institutional structure were taken only in the 90s. Research undertaken in this area by D. North has proven the promise of this direction of scientific research. However, these works did not formulate a holistic theory of transaction costs and property rights during the period of change in the institutional environment, and also did not consider the possibility of using formalized methods for studying transaction costs in unstable developing markets.

1 Alchian A., Demsetz N. Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization. American Economic Review, 62,
1972. P. 777-795.

2 Coase, R. H., The Firm, the Market, and the Law. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1937.

3 North D.C. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990.

Since the problem of contractual relations, property rights and transaction costs was not relevant for the Soviet economy, domestic scientists did not make a significant contribution to the theory of transaction costs. The formation and development of the market in Russia caused the emergence of relevant scientific research. Among them, one can note the works of S. Avdasheva, O. Belokrylova, R. Kapelyushnikov, R. Nureyev, A. Oleynik, V. Polterovich, V. Radaev, V. Tambovtsev, A. Shastiko, etc. However, the authors of most publications in recent years do not pay attention to sufficient attention to the study of the quantitative aspect of transaction costs. All the few similar calculations, for example in the works of S. Malakhov, underestimate the possibilities of practical application of the developed models.

This determined the need for theoretical developments based on models of foreign and domestic institutional economics and at the same time taking into account the peculiarities of Russian conditions, as well as empirical studies devoted to testing the comparative effectiveness of various models for assessing the quantitative parameters of transaction costs. The implementation of these studies is a necessary condition for the widespread introduction of methods of a scientific approach into the practice of measuring and analyzing transaction costs in the Russian economy.

The above allows us to conclude that the problems of studying transaction costs in their quantitative aspect and taking into account the characteristics of the modern Russian economy have not yet been sufficiently resolved and require active attention. This determined the choice of the topic of dissertation research. The complexity, multidimensionality and insufficient development of a number of theoretical and empirical issues of transaction costs, the objective need for their scientific understanding and comprehensive analysis determined the choice of goals, objectives, structure and content of this dissertation research.

The purpose of the study is to determine specific parameters, main factors, the essence and structure of transaction costs of Russian enterprises and develop a method for measuring them.

6 To achieve this goal, the following were decided main goals:

Analysis of the most recognized models of institutional economics,
generalization of known approaches to explaining nature and definition
specifically Russian conditions of transaction costs and studying
the possibilities of their application in the study of modern domestic
economics;

Study of the most significant factors of magnitude
transaction costs;

analysis of the characteristics of the Russian economy as determining conditions for the emergence of transaction costs;

identifying the shortcomings of existing approaches to measuring transaction costs;

searching for an information base for calculating transaction costs that is as close as possible to the daily activities of any company, studying its main features that influence the measurement results;

carrying out experimental calculations of transaction costs at the level of individual domestic enterprises.

Object of study is a modern Russian enterprise in the form of a complex complex of many contractual relations in the conditions of the formation of market relations and transformation of the institutional environment.

Subject of study- transaction costs arising in the process of exchange between economic agents and factors. their conditioning in the process of formation of market relations in Russia.

Theoretical and methodological basis of the study is represented by fundamental and applied works of foreign and domestic scientists in the field of neo-institutional economics, in particular, within the framework of: the theory of transaction costs, the theory of property rights, the theory of optimal contract, the theory of public choice, etc.

Instrumental and methodological apparatus research has become
the use of hypothetico-deductive and inductive methods of scientific
knowledge. When substantiating theoretical positions and arguing conclusions
During the dissertation work, general scientific methods were actively used:
comparative, structural-functional, analysis and synthesis. When deciding
specific problems of studying transaction costs in modern
in Russian conditions, methods of mathematical analysis were used,
applied statistics, econometrics: economic-statistical

groupings, forecast estimates, modeling of economic phenomena, time series, etc.

Information and empirical base of the study includes laws and regulations of the Russian Federation, data from the Federal Statistics Service of the Russian Federation and other official government bodies of Russia, non-governmental international and Russian organizations, materials from monographs and articles by domestic and foreign economists in periodicals, materials from scientific and practical conferences, reporting and accounting data of real Russian enterprises , as well as the results of the author’s empirical research.

Working hypothesis of the study is based on a system of theoretical and methodological views, according to which the structure and level of transaction costs of enterprises, which are an objective element of contractual relations, are the most important indicator of economic development. To increase the efficiency of the activities of subjects of the national economy, it is necessary to reduce their unproductive costs for organizing exchange relations, expressed in transaction costs. The basis of the directions for limiting transaction costs is to determine the sources of occurrence and factors of their dynamics, as well as the development of a method for the most accurate and complete measurement of the value of transaction costs at the micro level.

The provisions of the dissertation submitted for defense are

The formation and progress of market relations inevitably causes the expansion and dominance of the sphere of circulation, the degree of development of which largely determines the unhindered implementation of contractual relations with the minimization of transaction costs. The decisive role in creating and maintaining the necessary conditions for exchange relationships is played by the institutional environment of the economic system, the development of which and its adequacy are a key, complex factor in the transaction costs of contractual relations between enterprises. The current state of transforming Russian institutionalization does not contribute to solving these problems, which forces enterprises to turn to extra-institutional regulation of contracts, to shadow relations and, consequently, to incur significant transaction costs.

Transaction costs in the Russian economy that accompany the development of contractual relations in any of the existing definitions and classifications constitute a significant amount both at the macro level and at the level of firm contracts. Their high level is an indicator of the imperfection of the institutional environment of the Russian economy. “Government failures” in institutional support for the economic activities of enterprises, manifested in corruption and administrative barriers, coupled with the general underdevelopment of the institutional environment, become a specific factor in hypertrophied transaction costs in Russia.

The trend of the Russian economy has become the dependence of its comprehensive efficiency on the development of the sphere of exchange, the key indicator of the perfection of which is the level of transaction costs. This predetermines the need to search for methods for their most accurate and complete measurement. This problem is of particular importance in the study of the economic activities of an enterprise, since existing methods for measuring transaction costs either relate to the macro level or have the nature of expert assessments.

As the main source of information necessary to measure the transaction costs of enterprises, one should use their accounting and reporting data provided to external users, which most accurately and comparablely summarize the economic results of business. At the same time, standard reporting of Russian enterprises can only serve as a source of data for assessing the indicator level of transaction costs. Their exact values ​​at individual enterprises can be assessed with in-depth additional processing of accounting data.

An effective method for measuring transaction costs at the enterprise level can be a two-level analysis of key cost items recorded in accounting data and standard reporting: commercial expenses; administrative expenses; non-operating expenses; general running costs; taxes and mandatory payments. These cost items should be analyzed, firstly, for approximate estimates of the total value of transaction costs and, secondly, for more accurate estimates, as a set of elements of a transactional and transformational nature.

An analysis of the expenses of individual enterprises of various organizational and legal forms proves their significant losses from transaction costs. Their main source is not so much direct unproductive losses of the enterprise, but rather the artificial inhibition of the expansion of exchange relations.

Scientific novelty dissertation work consists of identifying factors and specific parameters that have the greatest impact on the value of transaction costs in the modern Russian economy and developing a method for their assessment and measurement at the enterprise level.

Study of theoretical issues of transaction costs and empirical testing of the effectiveness of using models for their assessment in

conditions of the Russian market led To the following results, containing, in the author’s opinion, elements scientific novelty:

The specifics of the Russian institutional environment and its influence on the development of the contract system, which is characterized by underdevelopment and sometimes complete absence of institutions, one of the main functions of which is to reduce transaction costs, are shown. The dual significance of transaction costs, which are both an indicator of institutional imperfections and real losses of enterprises, is substantiated. The main negative role of transaction costs in the Russian economy is determined by their potentially high level for individual contractual relations and, as a consequence, by restraining the development of the sphere of exchange and the economy as a whole.

The key importance of the state in the institutional provision of the economy and its factorial influence on the level of transaction costs arising in the interaction of economic agents is revealed. Features have been identified and the specific impact of administrative barriers and corruption on the operating conditions of Russian enterprises has been determined, consisting in their widespread distribution, replacement of institutional regulation and self-reproduction, and manifested in a high level of transaction costs.

Existing approaches to the definition and classification of transaction costs are summarized, which made it possible to determine their components, structure individual elements and reasonably propose methods for measuring them at the enterprise level. Russian accounting and reporting data were selected as the most representative information base for quantitative analysis of transaction costs, allowing for comparability and retrospective analysis of transaction costs of individual enterprises.

The specifics of reflecting the results of economic activities of firms in Russian accounting have been studied, which has made it possible to identify

and its following features: complexity, integrality, multi-component indicators that affect the effectiveness of the economic assessment of transaction costs.

An original method for two-level measurement of transaction costs of enterprises has been developed, based on the analysis of standard reporting and detailed accounting data, which makes it possible to estimate the value of transaction costs, respectively, with a lower (indicative) and greater degree of reliability, and differs from existing methods by focusing on the direct calculation of transaction costs at the level individual enterprises.

The main indicators of external accounting and reporting are determined, indicating the level of transaction costs of the enterprise: commercial expenses, administrative expenses, non-operating expenses, general business expenses, taxes and mandatory payments.

A quantitative analysis of the external reporting of real Russian enterprises of various forms of ownership, organization and type of economic activity was carried out, the results of which reflect the main features of transaction costs: high level, variety of forms, significant differences in structure, dependence on the specifics of the enterprises’ activities and a tendency to growth.

Theoretical significance of the study is that it proves the need to revise some of the assumptions used in standard models of foreign institutional economics when developing a methodology for determining transaction costs w unstable emerging markets. The main provisions and conclusions contained in the dissertation can be used in the further development of the theory of transaction costs in a transition economy, which is characterized by changes in the main parameters of the institutional environment. The results of the study are applicable in the practice of economic analysis of transaction costs that have a negative impact on

relations of exchange, distribution and redistribution, pricing and integral efficiency of enterprises.

Practical significance of the study is that the results obtained can be applied to improve the quantification and analysis of transaction costs. The feasibility of the practical use of the solutions obtained for the problems of measuring transaction costs was confirmed when studying the level of transaction costs at specific enterprises. In addition, the results of the study can be used in teaching courses “Economic Theory”, “Institutional Economics”, “Cost Management” and “Pricing”.

Approbation of research results. The results and conclusions of the dissertation research were presented by the author at international, all-Russian, regional, intra-university scientific and practical conferences in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Sochi, Rostov-on-Don in 2001 - 2004. The methodological provisions proposed in the dissertation work are used at the enterprises of the North Caucasus Railway and at the Phoenix publishing house. Some results of the work were reflected in scientific research reports carried out with the participation of the author in 2002 - 2003. at RGUPS.

The main provisions of the dissertation research are reflected in 15 publications with a total volume of 6.4 pp.

Market transformations and the formation of contractual relations

The transition in Russia from a planned economy with the dominance of relations of direct distribution of goods and services to a market economy with the dominance of the sphere of circulation, and, consequently, a larger size of the transaction sector and the total volume of transaction costs, inevitably confronts us with the need for a deep rethinking of this phenomenon.

The growing interest in the study of transaction costs in modern economic science is partly explained by the unexpected results for researchers of the analysis of the dynamics of transaction costs in transition economies. Let us quote the exact statement of R. Coase: “If I were asked to show an economic system in which transaction costs do not exist, I would name an absolutely communist society”4. However, the dynamics of the structure of the post-Soviet Russian economy indicates that the removal of restrictions on the freedom of market transactions, i.e. in fact, the exchange of property rights leads to a significant increase in transaction costs. This is obvious both at the macro level with a qualitative analysis of the ratio of growth rates (decline) of the shares of transformation (industry, construction, agriculture, transport) and transaction (wholesale and retail trade, communications, financial and banking services, insurance, real estate, education, consulting and auditing services, market infrastructure, information technology, etc.) sectors5 in GDP, and at the micro level when analyzing the costs of individual enterprises. Note that in developed countries there is also an increase in the growth of the share of the transaction sector in the economy; it is based, however, on qualitatively different reasons (division of labor and deepening specialization, technological progress accompanied by an increase in the size of firms and the strengthening role of the government in relations with the private sector). The processes taking place in Russia obviously have the same direction. But the growth of the transaction sector of the Russian economy in absolute terms is not accompanied by an adequate reduction in transaction costs at the level of an individual transaction. In developed countries, the size of the transaction sector is very large; for example, back in 1970 in the USA, the size of this sector was 55% of the total gross domestic product. Accordingly, the share of resources necessary for its functioning is significant. But these costs support a high level of development of market infrastructure, specification and protection of property rights. For example, one of the ways to reduce transaction costs is to create effective legal regulation of economic relations between agents, based on a clear and unambiguous specification of the rights and obligations of the parties to the transaction. In the case of inadequate specification, which is typical for the modern Russian economic system, the law itself becomes a source of transaction costs, the desire to use legal norms decreases in society, companies turn to “shadow justice,” and the criminalization of society increases.

In Russia today we can observe a situation where there has been a significant growth in the transaction sector. But the resources spent on its maintenance are not compensated by the specialization of labor and the expansion of the framework of exchange. The underdevelopment of the specification and protection of property rights, market infrastructure, legislation, as well as corruption and administrative barriers prevent the benefits from specialization of labor and expansion of the sphere of circulation.

Therefore, focused attention on the exchange and contractual aspects of the relationship between economic entities is necessary when studying the problems of the modern Russian economy. The contract and its accompanying processes, phenomena and externalities, in particular such an important aspect of exchange relations as transaction costs, should play a key role in the analysis of the Russian economy at the present stage. A contract in each individual case is only a specific framework for the interaction of the parties involved in an exchange designed to increase the well-being of the parties, as Adam Smith spoke about7. In his fair opinion, the division of labor and specialization of production, which are the basis of economic progress, contribute to increasing the welfare of the parties to the exchange. Ignoring transaction costs, this is a very elegant design. The volume of production grows, because everyone produces only what they have a comparative advantage in, and social welfare grows accordingly. But in reality, the expansion of the sphere of circulation as a result of an increase in the scale of exchange made the service sector dominant in the most developed economies. Thus, the sharp increase in specialization and division of labor, which contributed to an increase in production, simultaneously increased the costs associated with exchange, quality assessment, measurements of many parameters of exchanged items, control over personnel, etc. The expansion of the scale of exchange inevitably led to an increase in the absolute value of transaction costs Yet the increase in these costs was offset by gains in productivity as a result of increased specialization and division of labor. Specific transaction costs per transaction have decreased. Yes, the result is positive. But its fruits were largely absorbed by the costs of exchange.

Transaction costs; classification, measurement

Transaction costs are a key term in neo-institutional economic theory, which has been rapidly developing in recent years. The lack of a generally accepted interpretation of this category causes scientific discussions and disputes. Transaction costs have deservedly received the epithet of “a well-chosen, unfortunate concept”32. In any case, when studying transaction costs, one must take into account that they exist in any real economic system, just as in any system there is uncertainty and opportunistic behavior of economic agents33. Despite the fact that “there are many schools of transaction costs” and many economists “lump together all the shortcomings of the market under the general name of transaction costs,” their very phenomenon deserves very serious attention.

The concept of transaction costs was introduced in 1930. XX century R. Coase in his article “The Nature of the Firm”35. It has been used to explain the existence of hierarchical structures that are antithetical to the market, such as the firm. We believe that R. Coase reasonably linked the formation of these “islands of consciousness” with their relative advantages in terms of saving on transaction costs. He saw the specifics of the company's functioning in the suppression of the price mechanism and its replacement with a system of internal administrative control.

Within the framework of modern economic theory, transaction costs have received many interpretations, sometimes diametrically opposed.

Thus, K. Arrow defines transaction costs as the costs of operating an economic system36. He compares the effect of transaction costs in economics with the effect of friction in physics; We suggest that this interpretation, despite its imaginativeness and originality, in some sense blurs the concept of transaction costs. Based on such assumptions, conclusions are drawn that the closer an economy is to the Walrasian general equilibrium model, the lower its level of transaction costs, and vice versa.

In a clearer, in our opinion, interpretation by D. North, transaction costs “consist of the costs of assessing the useful properties of the object of exchange and the costs of ensuring rights and enforcing their compliance”37. The need to reduce transaction costs becomes the main reason for the emergence of institutions.

Transaction costs exist not only in market economies, but also in alternative modes of economic organization and, in particular, in planned economies. Within the framework of an administrative-command economy, they take other forms, but their magnitude is more than significant. Thus, according to S. Chang, maximum transaction costs are observed in a planned economy, which ultimately determines its inefficiency38. Indeed, such an assumption has some basis, but at the same time, the complexity of measuring transaction costs proves the impossibility of an unambiguous view of this problem.

The structure of social production in an administrative-command economy is presented as a “single factory.” It is assumed that commodity relations in society are harmful because they stimulate selfishness, and they are viewed from a purely technological point of view. The possibility of centralized collection of all resources and all information and their systematic, optimal distribution is assumed.

In 1960 - 1970 At the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, they created the theory of optimal functioning of the socialist economy - SOFE, which assumed the possibility of optimizing all flows at the level of the national economy, which they saw as a “single factory”. Naturally, this was only a theoretical model; it was not applicable in practice. The fact is that during its development the presence of transaction costs was not taken into account. In reality, three types of transaction costs prevent society from functioning as a single factory. These are measurement costs, costs of acquiring and transmitting information, and agency costs. But the property of a socialist state had to find in itself some mechanisms for implementation, and state planning became such a mechanism. The State Planning Committee was the center where all information about the production capabilities of all enterprises was collected and where forecasts were made, i.e., several resource allocation strategies were calculated in order to satisfy certain needs.

The system of material balances was a huge achievement of Soviet economic science. However, despite this amazing planning system, it should also be noted that it has a very significant negative side. The coarsening of estimates, teams, and strategies led, first of all, to a lag in the system of technological approvals for products. Although it is impossible not to note the built-in mechanisms to counteract the tendencies of coarsening: 1) military acceptance. In this case, the consumer is directly involved in production, and administrative levers work here; 2) consumer demand. Sometimes the consumer refused to buy low-quality products, and no one could force him to buy; 3) system of technological standards. The shortcomings of the Soviet planning system suggested certain ways of adapting to them: 1) nomenklatura adaptation, the so-called adjustment of plans. In fact, the adopted plan was not a plan, but a current system of guidelines that were given in kind to enterprises, their suppliers, and consumers; 2) financial adaptation. The credit system allowed the enterprise to attract additional resources and reduce the fragility of the existing planning system; 3) “residual principle”. Priority sectors and residual sectors were identified. If the entire system was not balanced naturally, then its current balancing was carried out at the expense of the remaining sectors.

The Soviet-type economy, thanks to these stabilizers, existed for quite a long time, although its inefficiency was inherent in the very mechanism of functioning.

The most appropriate definition of transaction costs for the purposes of our research is given by C. Menard. He sees them as the costs of “the functioning of the exchange system or, more precisely, within the framework of a market economy, what it costs to use the market to ensure the allocation of resources and transfer property rights”39.

Institutional environment as a factor in the dynamics of enterprise transaction costs

Economic agents make choices within certain limits determined by existing institutions that have an inertial dynamic and are often ineffective. However, the very existence of institutions is determined by limited rationality, the lack of ability to assess the market situation anew and fully calculate possible behavioral strategies. Therefore, the company operates within a certain framework of formal (enshrined in the system of current legislation) and informal (enshrined in the traditionally applied stereotype of behavior) institutions. The inefficiency of institutions structuring the activities of an enterprise causes an increase in the size of its transaction costs. Moreover, a single enterprise is objectively incapable of changing existing institutions. Of course, if this enterprise is not of the same scale as OJSC Gazprom or the Ministry of Railways of the Russian Federation, which actually independently developed the legislative framework for regulating the activities of OJSC Russian Railways, which arose on its basis. Institutions initially act as a determinant of the rules of action, laws and moral norms that structure economic relations and govern access to power and its use. It is believed that the emergence of institutions is due to the desire to save effort and resources spent. for the acquisition and processing of information, i.e. transaction costs. World Bank research confirms that the quality of institutions significantly influences countries' economic outcomes. It would be logical to assume that one of the main functions of institutions is to minimize the costs that firms spend on reaching agreements among themselves and ensuring the implementation of agreements, i.e. transaction costs.

In modern Russian conditions, the formal institutions necessary for the market are often simply absent, the existing ones are far from perfect, and the “soft” informal framework of interaction, such as morality, trust, business reputation, etc., is very undeveloped. In such a situation, business entities are forced to create their own technologies for interaction with counterparties and the state and, accordingly, bear increased transaction costs. The main advantages of institutions over individual forms of structuring the interaction of an enterprise with other economic agents include the effect of economies of scale. Thus, the value of transaction costs becomes an indicator of the degree of imperfection of the institutional environment for the effective functioning of the market. Quantitative estimates of transaction costs contained in some studies indicate that these unproductive social costs dictate the need for theoretical and practical rethinking of the existing Russian institutional environment and its adaptation to market relations.

The need for the process of transition to a market in modern Russia is practically not questioned by anyone. The differences are, perhaps, only in ideas about which “market model” has the best prospects. As a result, “market transition” has become a rather abstract concept. But it should be understood that the market is not only an aggregated set of individual exchanges and a relatively independent self-regulating system. The market is also a set of institutional restrictions within which the activities of economic agents occur. To understand the market mechanism the following steps are required; analysis of the construction of institutional forms in the everyday interaction of entrepreneurs, workers, consumers; clarification of the procedure for accessing resources and monitoring the activities of economic agents; consideration of the relationships that develop between entrepreneurs and government officials; identifying ways to form networks of informal exchange of services; studying the processes of formation of ethics in business relations.

A generally accepted and undoubtedly fair thesis in recent years has been the assertion that the legislative and regulatory framework of the Russian economy is imperfect. The adoption of laws takes years. But the main thing is that adopted laws are often not implemented, which is already associated with the imperfection of the enforcement mechanism. Both entrepreneurs and the population treat them quite disdainfully. Most entrepreneurs prefer to comply with laws “to the extent possible,” that is, if they do not interfere with the activities of the enterprise. Moreover, representatives of government bodies themselves often violate constitutional principles and federal legislation.

A striking example of non-compliance with established formal rules is the evasion of taxes by entrepreneurs. According to estimates by the Working Center for Economic Reforms under the Government of the Russian Federation, only 1.5% of Russian enterprises pay all taxes on time and in full. About two-thirds hide part of their income. And about a third of enterprises evade paying taxes altogether. Thanks to control measures in. In 2002, it was possible to add 220.6 billion rubles to the budgets of all levels, taking into account tax sanctions and penalties. True, the budget system has received 68.7 billion rubles from these funds so far, but this is 9 billion rubles more than in 2001.”

Tax evasion is considered completely legitimate from the positions of both entrepreneurs and public opinion and is becoming a recognized norm. It has become a common, justified and, moreover, natural element of an effective economic strategy. According to the Ministry of Taxes and Taxes as of June 1, 2004, out of 3.4 million legal entities registered in the Russian Federation, more than 0.5 million did not provide tax reporting or provided a “zero” balance. According to various estimates, the state annually receives up to 30% of the payments due. According to the “Office for Organizing the Investigation of Tax Crimes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia”, in 2003, only in criminal cases under investigation, the amount of damage amounted to more than 1.5 billion rubles, and this is only for crimes related to VAT refund100.

The most important circumstance of Russian reality, in our opinion, is that property rights in the Russian economy are not sufficiently specified. As Radygin A.D. and Malginov G.N. rightly point out? It is unclear where state ownership ends and private and corporate ownership begins101. Often, property formally belongs to one entity, and is used by another, and accordingly, it is simply impossible to determine responsibility. At the same time, entrepreneurs themselves are often interested precisely in the uncertainty of property relations. In such conditions, development strategies (usually informal) cannot but have a limited time horizon. The notorious shortage of investments in the real sector is associated with the lack of not only funds, but also the lack of long-term economic guidelines among agents who have such funds. Although recently there has been a significant revival of investment activity, it has a specific character. According to estimates by the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, direct investment in fixed assets in 2003 amounted to 72 billion US dollars. Of these, only 6.5 billion are foreign direct investments102.

Analysis of enterprise expenses in terms of identifying transaction costs

Analysis of transaction costs in terms of their quantitative measurement is possible using two approaches: ordinalistic and cardinalistic. The first is based on taking into account the significance of only the direction of change in transaction costs. Consequently, only the relationship between different levels of transaction costs for a single act of economic interaction occurring in different organizational and contractual contexts is analyzed. “This problem is resolved through comparative institutional analysis to compare transaction costs under different contracting methods. Accordingly, what is important is the difference in transaction costs, not their absolute value.”147 The ordinalistic approach is currently dominant, which is largely explained, as we indicated above, by the “fuzzy” definition of the very concept of transaction costs.

The problem of measurability of transaction costs remains one of the main obstacles to the application of the theory of the same name in specific economic analysis. The question remains whether all types of transaction costs can be measured in monetary terms. Even the usual procedure for expressing in monetary terms the time spent on completing a transaction is imperfect due to the absence in many cases of intermediaries specializing in providing one or another aspect of the transaction (for example, negotiations). Even more questions arise when trying to estimate in monetary terms those costs that do not take an explicit form, for example, psychological discomfort arising due to the opportunistic behavior of a previously trusted partner or due to the insecurity of property rights. The situation with measuring transaction costs is associated with the same problem that lay at the end of the 19th century. at the heart of the debate about the measurability of utility. As an alternative to the cardinal method of measuring utility, J. Edgeworth and I. Fisher proposed an ordinalistic approach, which consisted only of analyzing the relationship between various levels of utility and abandoning claims to estimate their absolute value149. It is in this direction that transaction cost theory is moving.

Comparative analysis of transaction costs arising when completing a transaction in various contractual and organizational contexts is largely limited to expert estimates of their value. Ranking different options relative to each other can eliminate imperfect methods of measuring transaction costs in monetary terms.

The most generally accepted attempt to apply the cardinalistic approach to measuring transaction costs is the work of J. Wallis and D. North130. They introduce a distinction between transformation costs (related to the physical impact on an object) and transaction costs. Moreover, both are recognized as productive. Economic agents strive to reduce their total amount without making any distinction between them. Both the transaction function and the transformation function require real costs. Moreover, within certain limits, transformation and transaction costs are interchangeable. The authors themselves define these types of costs as follows: “Transformation costs are the costs associated with the transformation of costs into finished products, the costs of implementing the transformation function. Transaction costs depend on the inputs of labor, land, capital and entrepreneurial talent that are used in the process of market exchange151.” J. Wallis and D. North studied the dynamics of the transaction sector of the US economy (private and public) for the period from 1870 to 1970 (see table).

Total transaction costs consist of the following items. Firstly, these are the services of the “transaction sector” (it includes industries whose “products” are considered as entirely having a transactional purpose - wholesale and retail trade, insurance, banking, etc.). Secondly, these are transaction services, but provided within the “transformation sector”. When assessing them, the authors proceed from the size of the remuneration fund for non-production workers in the industries of this sector. (Relatively speaking, these are the costs of the “management apparatus”, the organization of sales and supply, etc. in industry, agriculture and other divisions of the “transformation” complex.) The border between the two selected sectors is drawn by the authors approximately, and not according to any clear criteria, which they themselves recognize. This measurement attempt is at the macro level and contains many controversial issues.

In particular, the determination of the total volume of transaction costs as the sum of costs for services of the “transaction sector” and costs for services provided within the “transformation sector” is based on their exclusively intuitive division. Thus, the subject of discussion may be the inclusion or non-assignment to the “transaction sector” in addition to wholesale and retail trade, insurance, banking, real estate operations1, which have an entirely transactional purpose, and also transport. In addition, it is very difficult to isolate the transactional component of the “transformation sector”. In this case, taking into account only the wage fund of non-production workers seems to be an overly simplified method of allocating the costs of transactions within the “transformation sector”. Indeed, in addition to the wage fund, the transaction sector within enterprises is represented by a very wide range of other costs. This will be discussed in more detail below.

People's “natural” tendency to conceal and distort information leads to transaction costs overloading the economy. And yet, modern markets exist and operate successfully. What allows you to keep “friction” at an acceptable level? We can identify seven main factors that reduce the “interaction costs” of entities in a developed market economy.

1) Favorable legal environment. This is a legal structure that meets the following requirements:

· thoughtfulness (from the point of view of economic incentives created by the legal system);

· simplicity and universality of the rules of the game;

· low level of corruption and bureaucratization;

· the presence of centralized (state) mechanisms for maintaining law and order, including a mechanism for resolving conflicts and enforcing compliance with agreements.

2) Law-abiding nature of economic entities, in particular respect for the property rights of others. This quality makes it possible to reduce not only the costs of control and coercion by the state, but also the risk of opportunistic behavior of counterparties. The latter is extremely important from the point of view of “mutual trust,” which we highlight as the next factor.

3) High level of trust in society. Confidence in transaction costs acts as a critical and very effective component in reducing the overall level of “friction.” Unfortunately, trust cannot be artificially reproduced - it is a product of long evolution. However, the state is able to speed up this process by promoting the formation of a favorable legal framework.

4) Macroeconomic and political stability. These factors reduce the level of uncertainty inherent in the economic system, which facilitates long-term planning and reduces investment risk.

6) Development of the information infrastructure of the economy. This parameter directly affects the costs of searching for information.

7) Effective informal rules, customs and traditions.

Sometimes traditions rooted in society can dramatically reduce the “friction” in the economy. The example of Japan is interesting in this regard. Local businessmen pay great attention to personal relationships between partners. Compromise is always preferred to confrontation. Accordingly, during the negotiation process, the parties usually do not resort to the assistance of lawyers. As a result, the propensity to use judicial mechanisms in Japan is much lower than in other developed countries.

Compliance with the above conditions, unfortunately, is a rare case: they are met exclusively in countries with developed market economies. Only it is distinguished by a high level of trust, respect for property rights and relatively homogeneous ideas about justice and methods of resolving conflicts. This allows society to reduce the high level of transaction costs and opens the way to various forms of interaction and cooperation. The rest of the world economy does not have such a powerful immunity to “friction,” which inevitably affects the number and capacity of markets.

3.3.6. “FRICTION” IN TRANSITION ECONOMY

The lack of necessary elements that reduce the level of transaction costs is one of the biggest problems in a transition economy. In particular, rapid changes in the political sphere inevitably lead to serious gaps in the legal infrastructure. In a “turbulent” society, the level of mutual trust is also low. As a result, transaction costs begin to predetermine a lot in such an economy: their gigantic size not only inflates prices, but also slows down the development of new markets and erects barriers to investment.

The economy becomes like a man walking in water. The enormous resistance of the environment leads to the fact that it reacts to all stimuli slowly and reluctantly. Firms stubbornly exploit obsolete production assets and are in no hurry to satisfy existing effective demand. And it is no coincidence: if you calculate commercial operations taking into account transaction costs, many of them will turn out to be unprofitable.

We find evidence in favor of this thesis in everyday life. Perhaps the most striking of them is the high cost, typical for Russia, with a still low level of quality of goods and services (in 2006, Moscow took second place in the list of the most expensive megacities in the world). Moreover, in the form of unjustified high prices, this problem is typical for the most prosperous domestic markets. Many secondary markets simply do not exist, which deprives us of a large number of benefits of civilization.

Why doesn’t a Russian who receives an average salary periodically have breakfast or dinner at the nearest cafe, as the average European often does? The reason must be that there is no market. Nobody offers such a service at reasonable prices, despite the fact that it may be in demand by the consumer (there is effective demand) and profitable (the benefits of creating a cafe with inexpensive cuisine exceed direct costs). Transaction costs have created a barrier to entry into the industry. After taking their full sizes into account in the price of the dish, it rises to such a level that an ordinary Russian can no longer easily enter a cafe.

And since no firm can overcome this barrier, this market does not exist. Any potential participant will face the following problems:

1) there is no reliable protection of the enterprise and its clients from crime;

2) the tax pressure is too great;

3) there are no reliable suppliers, since many other markets are not developed (high costs of searching and concluding agreements on rates);

4) there is no qualified personnel (the cost of finding the necessary specialists);

5) there is no mechanism for resolving disputes (costs of coercion);

6) the monetary system is underdeveloped and (or) unstable, which complicates settlements with all counterparties.

The least developed markets are those that depend most heavily on the normal functioning of the transaction mechanism. An interesting example of this kind is the loan capital market in Russia. The underdevelopment of collateral legislation and the lack of effective ways to hold unscrupulous borrowers accountable lead to an increase in interest rates and a marginal reduction in borrowing volumes.

Certain market segments (for example, interbank lending) are hardly developing. The problem faced by: subjects is similar to the problem faced by the elderly insurance market. At high interest rates, the role of borrowers will most likely be those banks that lack liquid assets (adverse selection). It is almost impossible to find out the true financial condition of the borrower; therefore, risk arises. The result is a market fiasco: an almost complete absence of interbank lending.

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