Oliver Eaton (Olly) Williamson, former Charles and William L. Day Professor of Economics, Law and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania whose framework for analyzing the structure of organizations won him a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, died May 21 in Berkeley, California, after a period of failing health. He was 87. 

Dr. Williamson was born in Superior, Wisconsin. He graduated from Superior Central High School, before going on to receive a BS in management from MIT in 1955, and then an MBA from Stanford in 1960, and finally a PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 1963.

Dr. Williamson began his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an assistant professor of economics in the undergraduate program. In 1965, he moved to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor. He was promoted to professor three years later. Dr. Williamson served as the Charles and William L. Day Professor of Economics, Law and Public Policy, and he chaired the economics department from 1971-1972 and from 1976-1977. He also served as director of Penn’s Center for the Study of Organizational Innovation from 1976-1983. He went on leave in 1972 to complete a monograph for the Brookings Institution called Theories of Firm and Market Structures. While at Penn, he also won a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct comparative studies in industrial organization (Almanac April 19, 1977). 

He left Penn in 1983 to join the faculty at Yale. In 1988, he returned to Berkeley, where he became the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus of Business, Economics and Law. There, he created a world-renowned PhD workshop known today as the Williamson Seminar on Institutional Analysis. He retired in 2004.

In 2009, Dr. Williamson and Dr. Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work in organizational economics and his insights into what is known as the make or buy decision (Almanac October 27, 2009). This is the process by which businesses choose whether to outsource a process, service, or manufacturing function or to perform the work in-house. Hundreds of economists and policy-makers have since applied his framework to situations other than outsourcing, including the boundaries between public and private sector activity.

Traditional economic approaches of the early 1970s did not allow for analysis of governance within organizations. By showing that economics could illuminate the costs and trade-offs that parties make in transactions, Dr. Williamson brought governance and the management of relationships into economic theory. His multidisciplinary approach to analyzing organizational structures was unconventional in economics. 

In 2009, at a press conference to discuss the Nobel Prize, Penn President Amy Gutmann noted that Dr. Williamson “lauded the interdisciplinary climate at Penn, noting that he ‘related immediately to the idea that the social sciences should communicate with one another, and that there are boundaries that we ought to be prepared to cross’” (Almanac November 3, 2009). 

Two of Dr. Williamson’s five books, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications and The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting are said to be among the most cited in the social sciences.

Dr. Williamson is survived by his sons, Scott (Susanna Krentz), Oliver Jr. (Anna Suszanowicz) and Dean (Mihoko Matsue); daughters Tamara (Don Mohr) and Karen (Robert Indergand); grandchildren Kimberly and Kristin Indergand, Claire and Peter Williamson, and Erin Mohr; niece, Katherine Frisbie; and nephew, Steven Frisbie (Jennifer). A family memorial service will be held at a later time.

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