Organizations and Markets

Armen Alchian (1914-2013)

19 February 2013 at 10:48 am Peter G. Klein 4 comments

| Peter Klein |

Armen Alchian passed away this morning at 98. We’ll have more to write soon, but note for now that Alchian is one of the most-often discussed scholars here at O&M. A father of the “UCLA” property-rights tradition and a pioneer in the theory of the firm, Alchian wrote on a dizzying variety of topics and was consistently insightful and original.

Alchian was very intellectually curious, always pushing in new directions and looking for new understandings, without much concern for his reputation or legacy. One personal story: I once asked him, as a naive and somewhat cocky junior scholar, how he reconciled the team-production theory of the firm in Alchian and Demsetz (1972) with the holdup theory in Klein, Crawford, and Alchian (1978). Aren’t these inconsistent? He replied — politely masking the irritation he must have felt — “Well, Harold came to me with this interesting problem to solve, and we worked up an explanation, and then, a few years later, Ben was working on a different problem, and we started talking about it….” In other words, he wasn’t thinking of developing and branding an “Alchian Theory of the Firm.” He was just trying to do interesting work.

Updates: Comments, remembrances, resources, links, etc.:

• Robert Higgs
• David Henderson (1, 2)
• Jerry O’Driscoll
• Alex Tabarrok
• Doug Allen
• Dan Benjamin
• A 1996 Alchian symposium (gated)
• Alchian and Woodward’s review of Williamson (1985): “The Firm Is Dead, Long Live the Firm”

Entry filed under: - Klein -, History of Economic and Management Thought, Institutions, Law and Economics, People, Theory of the Firm.