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This article looks at how actors in the construction industry in the Occitanie region in France optimize transaction costs during the organization and management phases of construction projects. This study, conducted from January to September 2019, was made possible by our on-site involvement in a Bureau d’Études Techniques (BET) (Technical Design Office) located in Montpellier. This immersive experience enabled us to observe five projects in action in the Gard, Haute-Garonne, Hérault, and Pyrénées-Orientales departments, as well as to establish contacts to build our sample and conduct thirty-one interviews with professionals in the sector. Our results show that in order to understand the behavior and choices of actors in their cost optimization schemes, both the contributions of the firm’s neo-institutional theory and insights from socio-economic theories need to be taken into account. On the one hand, the study contributes to work on the definition of transaction costs in the construction industry by highlighting forms of cost linked to corrupt practices and racketeering. On the other hand, it also aims to show how actors’ social capital is formed, as well as the limitations of its benefits, particularly in terms of its impact on the choices made by actors to optimize transaction costs in construction projects. The first part of this article presents the contributions of neo-institutional theory, revisiting the origins of the concept of transaction costs to shed light on the specific characteristics of actors’ behaviors that may influence their choice to optimize them. It then looks at the socioeconomic theories (embeddedness and social capital) that defend the idea that actors are influenced by their social context, and not just by purely economic calculations. The second part of this article describes the fieldwork and the qualitative methodology used in the study. The third part presents the results, which are discussed in the fourth part.