Review article

The article discusses various institutional coordination mechanisms in the economy, their content and specific forms in which they exist. The authors analyze the market, hierarchy and contracts and as forms of institutional agreements, and economic institutions. Agreements are analyzed from a position of formal and informal rules and regulations, which are relevant to the agreements, and also from a position of organizational forms of these agreements accompanied with relevant kinds of transaction costs that they represent. Several typologies of business firms are also presented in terms of the criterion of the hierarchy development degree. The approach to management of the economy in terms of using various forms of institutional agreements is substantiated. Various forms of institutional agreements are characterized and the possibilities of using such agreements which allow saving transaction costs are discussed. A hypothesis is put forward about the trends of changing the ratio in the structure of institutional agreements in Russia in direction of reducing the number of purely market institutions and increasing the number of the hierarchical and contractual ones. The materials of the article can be useful for stabilization of social and economic processes in Russia.