Skrobacki, Radosław2013-03-182013-03-182007Ruch Prawniczy, Ekonomiczny i Socjologiczny 69, 2007, z. 3, s. 179-181.0035-9629http://hdl.handle.net/10593/5441The paper is an attempt to determine the relation between risk and trust and its influence on how contracts are entered into by small and medium-sized private companies today, in the area divided into the “old” and “new” economy. Both phenomena are treated as the basis on which a factor qualitatively separate from their direct total is constructed, whose specifics is then related to the necessity of commencing business in full readiness for relation-based contracts, a situation which the current market seems be prefer. These deliberations are carried out on the theoretical background of A. Gidden’s stratification model of the acting agent and the behavioural assumptions of O. E. Williamson’s transaction cost economics, and are focused on a contract as a phenomenon with consequences reaching much further than would have transpired from a mere analysis o f its contents. Such an approach allows to analyse also the social, and not only the formal impact of the practices used in the sector of small and medium-sized private companies, while the very importance, or meaning of risk and trust and their mutual derives from the impossibility to determine all the conditions and consequences resulting from business transactions concluded by those companies. Pointing out to the differences of transaction costs arising from different types of relations between risk and trust and, basing on his own research, the author describes selected similarities and differences between the representatives of the “old” and “new” economy operating in the sector of small and medium-sized private companies in respect o f two issues: the similarity in their of financial credibility of a contract depending on the ownership structure of business partners (here, distinctions are made between state-owned enterprises and private companies, which are divided further foreign companies operating in Poland, foreign companies operating abroad and Polish private companies) and the differences arising from the different character of business relations between companies operating in the same sector, in which the “old” economy demonstrates actual forms of co-operation with competitors, whereas the “new” economy limits itself to declaratory co-operation only.plArtykuł