Scholarship at the intersection of transaction cost economics (TCE) and marketing has enjoyed an impressive record of growth over the past three decades, and the future promises more of the same. Following Erin Anderson's perceptive uses of TCE in her 1982 dissertation, the field of marketing has made many constructive uses of and contributions to TCE, where the latter include broadening the reach of TCE, posing important challenges, and identifying opportunities still to be addressed. Given this history, we advance the proposition that the relation between TCE and marketing has been and should be a two-way street. In considering the scope for future research, we give special attention to issues of asymmetric costs, the dynamics of governance, and disequilibrium contracting. We also discuss the four precepts of pragmatic methodology, with special emphasis on prediction and empirical testing. The Appendix provides added perspective on the evolving "science of organization" of which TCE is a part.

in the American Economic Association Registry for randomized control trials under trial number AEARCTR-0000280. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Despite substantial interest in the potential for mobile money to positively impact the lives of the poor, little empirical evidence exists to substantiate these claims. In this paper, we present the results of a field experiment in Afghanistan that was designed to increase adoption of mobile money, and determine if such adoption led to measurable changes in the lives of the adopters. The specific intervention we evaluate is a mobile salary payment program, in which a random subset of individuals of a large firm were transitioned into receiving their regular salaries in mobile money rather than in cash.We separately analyze the impact of this transition on both the employer and the individual employees. For the employer, there were immediate and significant cost savings; in a dangerous physical environment, they were able to effectively shift the costs of managing their salary supply chain to the mobile phone operator. For individual employees, however, the results were more ambiguous. Individuals who were transitioned onto mobile salary payments were more likely to use mobile money, and there is evidence that these accounts were used to accumulate small balances that may be indicative of savings. However, we find little consistent evidence that mobile money had an immediate or significant impact on several key indicators of individual wealth or well-being. Taken together, these results suggest that while mobile salary payments may increase the efficiency and transparency of traditional systems, in the short run the benefits may be realized by those making the payments, rather than by those receiving them.

We report on an experiment examining why default options impact behavior. By randomly assigning employees to different varieties of a salary-linked savings account, we find that default enrollment increases participation by 40 percentage points—an effect equivalent to providing a 50 percent matching incentive. We then use a series of experimental interventions to differentiate between explanations for the default effect, which we conclude is driven largely by present-biased preferences and the cognitive cost of thinking through different savings scenarios. Default assignment also changes employees’ attitudes toward saving, and makes them more likely to actively decide to save after the study concludes. (JEL C93, D14, D91, O12)

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