A study on the problems of the structure of transaction costs

Abstract

The estimation of transaction costs is a well-known methodological problem, the solution of which determines the possibility, among other things, to estimate the conditions for business operations. The growing complexity of the social and economic interaction emphasizes the special role of transaction costs in regulation of the stability condition. The article analyzes approaches to the determination of the essential characteristics of transaction costs. The scientific evidence of dividing of transaction costs into normal and recertative is provided. Their differentiation is connected to the impact of uncertainty and also the principal unavoidability of transaction costs regardless the efficiency of the economic mechanism and other factors. An important factor here is friction force - flexibility of the economic space. The growth of transaction costs that is observed with the increased uncertainty emphasizes only the revealed features in the friction force of the economic environment. All this led to the conclusion on the availability of a generalizing factor that estimates the conditions of exchange transactions. For this, the notion of transaction capacity was introduced; it expresses the cumulative impact of the external and internal conditions, which, this way or another, are understood by the specialists making the managerial decisions. The existence of some value of transaction costs when transaction is declined presupposes an important assumption that the transaction capacity has the same limits of dynamics. The obtained results allow us to build a function of transaction capacity, which shall be considered as a tool for risk-profile analysis.