Oliver E. Williamson Quotes

You have to be damn certain you're putting something better in its place.

Even when you are right, there are costs and taxes associated with being tactical. When you are wrong, there are opportunity costs.

As the future is never known with certainty, the evaluation of the prospective benefits requires the formation of expectations. An acceptable house, partner or job, then, is one that offers an expected stream of future benefit that has a value in excess of the option to continue to search for an even better alternative.

At the end of the day, though, there are a huge number of considerations that our management team go through before accepting any project - checking out the license is just one of them.

In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a 'should' involved, and this cannot be worked out from, 'If I do this, what will happen?' alone.

I've made mistakes before of doing different projects just based on my dreams, my hopes, my thing, and not really thinking about my customers.

Never make a major decision based solely on money.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

I don't have a particular recommendation other than that we base decisions on as much hard data as possible. We need to carefully look at all the options and all their ramifications in making our decisions.

If you have difficulties making a decision, choose the lesser of the two evils.

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

We should not be making near-term decisions with long-term consequences without robustly debating these questions and fully considering the substantial and unpredictable risks of these actions.

I tremendously enjoy getting involved in a troubled situation and straightening it out... My interest would be if there was a situation that came up, and I thought I could do something with and the price was right, I would be interested.

I always marked up a piece of paper before taking a job, looking at the pluses and minuses. If the latter outnumbered the former, I would pass.

[Cost-benefit analysis is used:] ... to produce lofty academic-sounding reasons for endless inaction.

The statesman must weigh the rewards of success against the penalties of failure. And he is permitted only one guess.

I made a cold calculation that I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle.

If individuals have no sufficient reason to believe that a good situation today will have adverse long-term consequences, it must always be rational for them to aim to maximize their short-term good.

When a government faces an evil that might be avoided, the usual pattern is to first debate whether or not the evil is real or imagined; then determine how evil it really is; then is it an appropriate function of government to avoid it? Then what are the alternative ways to avoid it? Then what are the costs to avoid it? And finally, is the benefit of avoiding the evil worth the cost? In those cases where it is, it is by this time too late to avoid the evil and discussions shift to ameliorating the evil.

Hawks usually care about benefits; doves most about costs. Neither benefits or costs however are easily estimated in advance.

There is a cost to every decision, and whether or not you impose a public health order has costs to industry and the public.

Every good businessman or woman carefully analyzes all the available facts before making a decision.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.

The decision to put American lives at risk is a decision that has a very high hurdle to pass.

Applying cost-benefit analysis to regulation is no different than what most regulatory agencies do.