I've always loved this book for opening my eyes to think about the motivations for human structures rather than just enumerating and studying the common structures around us.
Theory of the firm has many applications for technologists.
In considering "disruptive" business models: why are transactions bundled together in an existing business model, and where would there be benefit in bundling them differently? In structuring dev teams: why does one mission lend itself to informal coordination within a team, while another can be trusted to collaborative processes across teams? And even in factorizing code: why does this set of concerns require informal coordination between functions (e.g. within a module or class), while this other set of concerns can be addressed at the app level through published interfaces?
So many things can be explained by transaction costs even if they're "just" mental. For example, Clay Shirky argued a long while back that mental transaction costs were a big reason why micropayments don't work and that still seems like a reasonable theory.
Theory of the firm has many applications for technologists. In considering "disruptive" business models: why are transactions bundled together in an existing business model, and where would there be benefit in bundling them differently? In structuring dev teams: why does one mission lend itself to informal coordination within a team, while another can be trusted to collaborative processes across teams? And even in factorizing code: why does this set of concerns require informal coordination between functions (e.g. within a module or class), while this other set of concerns can be addressed at the app level through published interfaces?