Posts filed under ‘Theory of the Firm’
São Paulo Workshop on Institutions and Organizations
| Peter Klein |
Three Brazilian institutions — Fundação Getúlio Vargas São Paulo, IBMEC São Paulo, and the University of São Paulo — are jointly sponsoring a “Research Workshop on Institutions and Organizations” in São Paulo, 2-4 September 2007. Keynote speakers are Jackson Nickerson, Armando Castelar, and me. From the blurb:
Seminar participants will discuss recent developments in the analysis of institutions and organizations through the lenses of Economics, Management, Sociology, Law and other social sciences. Instead of focusing on the contributions of specific disciplines dealing with institutions and organizations, workshop participants will emphasize differences and commonalities among different approaches, leading to potential advances and refinements in the field.
Here is registration information and a preliminary schedule.
Austrian Economics at the AoM
| Peter Klein |
Last week’s Academy of Management meeting featured a pre-conference workshop, “The Austrian School of Economics: Applications to Organization, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship,” organized by Nicolai and myself. I began with an overview of the Austrian approach and reviewed some of the key figures in its development. Panelists Joe Mahoney, Yasemin Kor, Dick Langlois, Nicolai, and Elaine Mosakowski each gave some prepared remarks about aspects of the Austrian tradition that apply to their work, followed by general discussion among the panelists and the audience. Here are copies of the prepared remarks and here are some photos (courtesy of Peter Hofherr).
We weren’t sure what to expect — a dozen or so participants, perhaps? — and were delighted when over 100 people showed up, leaving standing room only. This and other indicators suggest growing interest in Austrian economics among management scholars. Of course, a belief in the relevance of the Austrian approach to business administration is a core value here at O&M.
I’ll Be the Terror Bird and You Can Be the Ostrich
| Steven Postrel |
In the July 2007 AMR, there is an interesting article by Matthew Cronin and Laurie Weingart that looks at “representational gaps” between differentiated specialists working together on problems like product development. They employ a Carnegie School approach and postulate that these gaps will tend to hinder joint problem solving. Different specialties conceptualize goals and constraints differently, they may have trouble communicating, and so on. (more…)
Managing Through Incentives
| Nicolai Foss |
In my recent mention of various textbooks on organizational economics I somehow forgot to mention two excellent books on the subject. One is by former O&M guest blogger Joe Mahoney (which makes the omission the more embarrassing), Economic Foundations of Strategy (most of which turns out to be organizational economics). The other is the more managerially oriented Managing Through Incentives by Dwight Lee (my co-blogger’s former University of Georgia colleague) and Donald McKenzie. In addition to watching 300, I read through most of Managing Through Incentives on my flight back from the AoM in Philadelphia.
The book is light and engaging, but not exactly your average management book. Although clearly intended for a management audience it is probably too long and complicated to successfully serve that role. But it is excellent as an inspiration for teachers of organizational economics and organizational strategy. It abounds in nice examples and applications of, mainly, agency theory that can be very usefully applied in teaching. Or you may simply read it for fun. There is a humorous tone to much of the writing, it has appealing libertarian leanings (David Friedman and Robert Hessen are approvingly cited), and it features a nice chapter that takes issue with Alfie Kohn’s views on incentives. Highly recommended!
Firm Boundaries in the Japanese Auto Industry
| Peter Klein |
A new NBER paper by Sadao Nagaoka, Yoshihisa Noro, and Akira Takeishi, “Determinants of Firm Boundaries: Empirical Analysis of the Japanese Auto Industry from 1984 to 2002.”
We have assessed the determinants of the choice of integration, relational contracting (keiretsu sourcing) and market sourcing by seven Japanese automobile manufacturers (OEMs) with respect to 54 components in light of contract economics. Our major findings are the following. First, the specificity and interdependency of a component significantly promotes vertical integration over keiretsu and keiretsu over market, consistent with transaction cost economics. Second, interdependency is a more important consideration for the former choice than for the latter choice, and the reverse is the case for specificity. This suggests that the hold-up risk due to specific investment can be
often effectively controlled by a relational contracting based on keiretsu sourcing, while accommodating non-contractible design changes may often require vertical integration. Third, while higher testability of a component makes the effects of specificity significantly smaller, it also promotes the choice of keiretsu sourcing over market sourcing. One interpretation of this last result is that while higher testability improves the contractibility of the component with high specificity, it simultaneously enhances the advantage of keiretsu sourcing since it provides more opportunities for the supplier to explore new information for a collaborative exploitation with an OEM.
Brilliant But Neglected II
| Peter Klein |
Some suggestions for Nicolai’s list:
John G .Matsusaka, “Corporate Diversification, Value Maximization, and Organizational Capabilities,” Journal of Business 74 (July 2001): 409-31. Offers a novel and provocative “match-seeking” theory of diversification in which firms do not know their own capabilities but must discover them by experimenting with various combinations of business units. A diversified firm may be valued at a discount relative to more specialized firms because its current lines of business include some not consistent with its capabilities, but such conglomeration is necessary, and value-creating in the long run, if the firm is to discover where it should eventually refocus. 85 hits on Google Scholar. Possibly neglected because it appeared in the Journal of Business near the end of its run.
Robert C. Ellickson, “A Hypothesis of Wealth-Maximizing Norms: Evidence from the Whaling Industry,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 5, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 83-97. A nice example of the emergence of private law, focusing on the rules governing property rights in whales prior to the twentieth century. Without a central authority the whaling community — a small, close-knit group with shared characteristics and frequent interaction — developed a complex set of norms enforced by community sanction and the threat of ostracism. Just 25 Google Scholar hits. (more…)
Management R&D Blog
| Peter Klein |
Luke Froeb and Brian McCann, whose book we discussed earlier, have a new blog, Management R&D. It looks good, so check it out.
Berle and Means Were Partly Right
| Peter Klein |
Check out Kenneth Lipartito and Yumiko Morii’s revisionist account of The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) — what they call the “ur-text of managerial capitalism” — and its influence on the academic and policy literatures. Well known interpretations of the Berle-Means thesis from Robert Gordon, James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others were far different from the original. Berle and Means cared little about efficiency, argue Lipartito and Mori, but were more interested in problems of power and social responsibility. They were wrong about dispersed ownership — stockholdings were actually more concentrated in the US than in other Western economies — but right that particular agents could exercise disproportionate control over corporate assets through family control and pyramid structures. Berle and Means’s main concern, in other words, was entrenchment more generally, not simply entrenched managers taking advantage of passive shareholders.
The paper is provocative but doesn’t cite the best modern work on corporate structure prior to the 1930s such as Holderness, Kroszner, and Sheehan (1999), which worries me. Worth a look in any case.
The Nature of the (Nonprofit) Firm
| Peter Klein |
Organizational economists are learning more about family firms and cooperatives but still know relatively little about nonprofits. What is their objective function? How are they organized, managed, and governed? Jill Horwitz and Austin Nichols’s NBER paper, “What Do Nonprofits Maximize? Nonprofit Hospital Service Provision and Market Ownership Mix,” looks at the behavior of nonprofit, government, and for-profit hospitals to address these questions. Key finding is that nonprofit and government-owned hospitals respond to competiton; the more local-market competition they face from for-profit hospitals, the more likely they will offer profitable services and the less likely they will offer unprofitable services. For-profit hospitals, however, tend to offer the same mix of services regardless of what competing for-profit hospitals are offering. Overall, Horwitz and Nichols find the Newhouse (1970) model, in which nonprofits maximize their own output, more plausible than the Hirth (1999) model in which nonprofits are “for-profits in disguise.” (HT: De Gustibus)
Adam Smith and the Corporation
| Peter Klein |
Larry Elliott writes in the Guardian that Adam Smith would oppose the modern shareholder model of the corporation. Smith, he argues, “would have looked askance at an economy gripped by speculative fever, with the emphasis not on making things but on buying and selling, making a turn, churning, taking a punt, sweating an asset.” Leaving aside for the moment that the distinction between “making” and “buying and selling,” as used here, is entirely specious, is this a fair interpretation of Smith? Elliott continues:
Smith, indeed, predicted what might happen in the Wealth of Nations, when he supported the idea of private companies (or copartneries) against joint stock companies, the equivalent of today’s limited liability firm. In the former, Smith said, each partner was “bound for the debts contracted by the company to the whole extent of his fortune”, a potential liability that tended to concentrate the mind. In joint stock companies, Smith said, shareholders tended to know little about the running of the company, raked off a half-yearly dividend and, if things went wrong, stood only to lose the value of their shares.
“This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies who would, upon no account, hazard their own fortunes in any private copartnery. The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.” (more…)
Empirical Research in the RBV
| Peter Klein |
Empirical work in transaction cost economics has been examined in several detailed reviews. Joskow (1988), Shelanski and Klein (1995), Klein (2005), and Macher and Richman (2006) are sympathetic to TCE while David and Han (2004) and Carter and Hodgson (2006) find the evidence less convincing. The critics of TCE raise some good points but do not, in my judgment, show that any rival theory has greater explanatory power. How about the resource-based view?
Surprisingly, while the RBV is central to much recent empirical work in strategy and organization, its empirical track record has not been scrutinized systematically as has TCE’s. Strategic Organization published a paper last year, “Tests of the Resource-Based View: Do the Empirics Have Any Clothes?” by Richard Arend, that begins to fill this gap. (more…)
History of Organizations Bleg from J.C. Spender
| Peter Klein |
Our friend J.C. Spender seeks help from the O&M readership:
I’m desperately searching for a history of organizations — not the history of corporations, nor of corporate law, nor of combinations, nor of Guilds, nor of military organizations, nor of religious ones either.
My problems are (1) to find literature about the history of organizations — are there some good books, papers, etc.? Now that I focus my mind on this I cannot come up with much other than the history of corporations and markets, rather than organizations and markets. My one discovery is the history of the Jesuit movement which, one might argue, was the first modernist “organization.”
(2) Barbara Czarniawska told me that the actual term “organization” only came into general use with the rise in “systems theory” — Henderson, Barnard, and Co. I find this unbelievable but I’m hard pressed to refute or in any other way resist her.
My intuition is that there is something here awaiting discovery about the decline of religion and the emergence of strictly secular and profit-oriented organizations — something beyond the Protestant Ethic therefore and entailing or legitimating a set of objectives which are not in the service of the public — quite to the contrary.
Any suggestions? Please share them below.
Efficient Organizational Design by Marco Weiss
| Nicolai Foss |
Good textbooks in organizational economics are badly missing from the market. In particular, good textbooks that are more advanced than Brickley, Smith, and Zimmerman’s Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture (great book, BTW), but still more accessible than the average organizational economics research papers, basically do not exist. Milgrom and Roberts’s Economics, Organization, and Management has much interesting material in it, but there is simply too much material (students drown) and the book is extremely uneven in terms of readability (some chapters, e.g., chpt. 4 are hard to read even for advanced readers and even more for students). George Hendrikse’s Economics and Management of Organizations is organized much like the Milgrom and Roberts book but is more readable. However, parts of it are too difficult for the average 3rd or 4th year business student. (more…)
The Costs of SOX
| Peter Klein |
“Sarbanes-Oxley and Corporate Risk-Taking” by Leonce Bargeron, Kenneth Lehn, and Chad Zutter:
Many policymakers and corporate executives have argued that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”) has had a chilling effect on the risktaking behavior of U.S. corporations. This paper empirically examines this proposition. Using a large sample of U.S. and U.K. companies, we find that compared with their U.K. counterparts U.S. firms have significantly reduced their R&D and capital expenditures and significantly increased their cash holdings since SOX. We also find that the equity of U.S. companies has become significantly less risky vis-à-vis U.K. companies since SOX. Finally, using a large sample of U.S. and U.K. initial public offerings (“IPOs”), we find that the likelihood that an IPO was conducted in the U.K. increased significantly after SOX and that this effect was especially high for firms in high R&D industries. Taken together, the results support the view that SOX has had a chilling effect on risk-taking by publicly traded U.S. corporations.
Lehn is a former chief economist at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a founding editor (along with my former colleagues Jeff Netter and Annette Poulsen) of the Journal of Corporate Finance, and former director of CORI‘s predecessor organization CRCSE (Center for Resarch on Contracts and the Structure of Enterprise).
Here is a nice critique of SOX within a broader regulatory perspective. And check out the Mises Institute’s anti-SOX archive.
Plasticity and Asset Specificity
| Peter Klein |
A reader asks what I think of Alchian and Woodward’s concept of “plasticity” and how it relates to Williamson’s notion of asset specificity.
The term was introduced in “The Firm is Dead: Long Live the Firm” (Journal of Economic Literature, 1988), Armen Alchian and Susan Woodward’s thoughtful review of Williamson’s Economic Institutions of Capitalism. They define plasticity as the range of uses to which an asset may be put. “We call resources or investment ‘plastic’ to indicate that there is a wide range of discretionary, legitimate decisions within which the user may choose” (p. 69). In the Barzelian language favored on this blog, plasticity can be interpreted as the number of attributes — realized or potential — that assets possess. Trucks and copy machines are highly plastic. So are R&D labs, in the sense that they can be used to pursue long- or short-term objectives, to satisfy clients’ objectives or to maximize the researchers’ utility, and so on. Steel mills are implastic because they can be used to make steel and little else. (more…)
Do We Need a Project Project?
| Steven Postrel |
A peculiar fact about business schools (at least in the USA) is that project management is not part of the regular MBA curriculum. Why is this peculiar? Only because a huge percentage of the work managers do is organized into projects, the success or failure of strategies often rests on the quality of execution of projects, and many of the principles and techniques of good project management are not immediately obvious. But hey, if anyone needs to know about this trivial stuff they can always go to a two-day workshop and get a certificate (probably from an engineering department). (more…)
Concise Summary of Chandler’s Achievements
| Peter Klein |
Louis Galambos, writing at EH.News:
When Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., entered the subdiscipline of business history, the field was producing very little scholarship of great interest, even to other historians. When Chandler, the world’s leading historian of business, died recently (May 9, 2007) at the age of 88, his legacy included a vibrant, influential body of scholarship and active scholars producing studies that intersected creatively with important developments in economics, sociology, and political science — as well as modern history. Chandler remade business history by publishing a long series of works characterized by meticulous, penetrating research; careful analysis of the data; and, above all, original, imaginative synthesis. Drawing upon the sociology of organizations and Schumpeterian economic analysis of innovation, Chandler reconstructed our understanding of the rise of large enterprise in America and Europe. The business bureaucracies he described were innovative and efficient. Economies of scale and scope, as well as aggressive, successful research and development, enabled them to hold their positions in a capitalist system that was changing rapidly in the second and third industrial revolutions. Their leaders were investors, not Robber Barons; they guided the evolution of the giant, multinational, multidivisional enterprises that have played a central role in capitalist progress since the late nineteenth century. Chandler left the politics of political economy, the labor relations of the firm, and the gender and racial themes of interest to many American scholars of late to other historians of business. His focus throughout his long, amazingly productive career was on the large, successful corporations that have played the central role in global economic development in the modern era.
Core Economics for Managers
| Peter Klein |
Previously I’ve noted the new managerial economics texts by Dwight Lee and Richard McKenzie and Luke Froeb and Brian McCann. Joshua Gans was kind enough to send me a copy of his Core Economics for Managers (Thomson, 2005) and it looks like a good option as well.
The first thing one notices about the book is its brevity and clean, minimalist design: just 206 pages, no fancy graphics, and few sidebars or mini-cases. The book focuses on the “core” areas of pricing, competitive strategy, incentives, and contracts, omitting corporate strategy, human resource management, and peripheral areas like ethics. As its main pricing model, the book features not the increasingly irrelevant perfectly competitive (general or partial) equilibrium model, but a negotiation framework like that in Brandenburger and Nalebuff’s 1996 book Co-opetition. That is, unlike the typical strategy text, cooperative game theory gets as much attention as its more familiar noncooperative counterpart.
Part IV of the book, on contracting, looks particularly good. It favors the property-rights approach to the firm (in my judgment, the correct approach) over the nexus-of-contracts approach, and features a section on relational contracting, a topic usually omitted from introductory managerial texts.
Joshua will be revising the text in the coming months for a new edition and would appreciate suggestions for improvement.
More on the Austrian Firm Conference
| Peter Klein |
Anthony Evans offers further reflections on the “Austrian Market-Based Approaches to the Theory and Operation of the Business Firm” conference, including the epic Klein-Sautet showdown.
O&M at the AoM
| Peter Klein |
O&M will be well represented at the Academy of Management annual meeting in Philadelphia, 3-8 August 2007. Former guest blogger (and Philly native) Joe Mahoney is president-elect and program chair for the Business Policy and Strategy Division, so you know the program will be good.
I am chairing a Professional Development Workshop (PDW) titled “The Austrian School of Economics: Applications to Organization, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship” featuring former guest bloggers Mahoney and Dick Langlois along with Elaine Mosakowski, Yasemin Kor, Nicolai, and myself. Teppo of orgtheory.net has put together a session on “Entrepreneurship and Strategic Organization: Taking Stock, Problems, and Future Directions” which includes Jay Barney, Todd Zenger, Kirsten Foss, Mosakowski, Nicolai, and me. Other sessions of note include a PDW on the fifth anniversary of the excellent Strategic Organization (Nicolai is in that one too, along with O&M favorite and guest blogger Chihmao Hsieh’s mentor Jackson Nickerson); a session on the philosophical and epistemological foundations of strategy and organization theory, organized by Teppo and featuring regular O&M commentator J. C. Spender; a session on cognitition in organizational economics; and many other interesting workshops, lectures, and sessions on organization, strategy, entrepreneurship, and the market process.
PS: Before you go, be sure to study this article on Philadelphia dining from the current issue of Food and Wine Magazine.
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments