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lt;p>&lt;p&gt;Organization Theory and the Theory of the Firm The following summary is based on two chapters in the Handbook of Industrial Organization: ? Chapter 2 on The Theory of the Firm ? Chapter 3 on Transaction Cost Economics As the chapters were published in 1989, a great deal of recent research is not included However, key issues and open questions remain substantially the same Main Issues ? Behavior and organization within the firm is poorly understood relative to interactions between firms in markets; the lack of data probably accounts for much of this gap ? Even though applied research in this area is difficult, it is important to be aware of the main issues because they have implications for work in other areas ? For example, firm behavior is the result of a complex joint decision process within a network of agency relationships – employees are not owners ? If agency problems are sufficiently severe, the firms in question may not maximize their value 1. Limits of Integration ? What determines the scale and scope of a firm? ? Perhaps surprisingly, we do not have very good answers to this question ? It is difficult to specify measurable tradeoffs between the benefits and costs of integration ? Firms form, so some integration is optimal, but all transactions are not organized in a single firm, so there must be costs to increasing size ? Williamson (1975, 1985) poses the problem as one of selective intervention: why not combine all firms into one and intervene in their operations only when doing so is profitable? Firm Size ? Microeconomics texts refer to long run average costs curves that eventually slope up ? What are the sources of diminishing returns to scale? ? Lucas (1978) focuses on scarce managerial inputs ? Geanakopolos and Milgrom (1985) refer to the benefits of coordination balanced against the costs of communication and information acquisition ? Lucas (1967) focuses on adjustment costs that limit firm growth; Jovanovic (1982) emphasizes imperfect knowledge about ability that limits growth – these perspectives do not impose caps on size per se Incomplete Contracts ? The technological models do not really address the selective intervention problem ? A more productive approach considers problems with contracting that prevent selective intervention ? Williamson (1975, 1985) emphasizes that contracts are incomplete ? In reality, it is essentially impossible to use a contract to describe appropriate behavior in every contingency for every party ? This has implications for organization: when irreversible investments are required, contractual incompleteness can lead to hold up, which favors integration Incomplete Contracts and Investment ? Grossman and Hart (1986) establish that when contracts are incomplete, the allocation of residual control rights (rights not specified in the contract) becomes critical ? If residual control rights over a particular asset are allocated to the owner of that asset, then ownership determines the ex post division of surplus in cases not covered by the contract ? Thus, the ex post division of surplus depends on ownership ? This implies that ownership can affect the incentives for ex ante investments; integration or non-integration may be optimal depending on which yields better incentives for investment Information Flows and Incomplete Contracts ? Williamson (1985) asserts that organizational changes imply changes in information flows ? Certain information that is available at one cost before integration may not be available at the same cost after integration (Filson and Morales assume this) ? If true, organization design definitely influences performance, because information is used in decision making and incentive provision ? Grossman and Hart (1986) disagree with this view and assume that integration/non-integration affects only residual control rights Influence Costs ? Milgrom (1988) emphasizes that integration results in costly influence activities, which are essentially rent seeking activities undertaken by employees within the firm ? Non-market organizations are susceptible to influence costs because they have an authority structure that can affect resource allocation and because there are quasi rents associated with jobs within the hierarchy ? Bureaucratic inflexibility may be a rational response of firms to limit the extent of influence activities Relation to Empirical Work on Firm Size ? The authors, Holmstrom and Tirole, claim that the incomplete contracts paradigm and its associated issues (incentives, information flows, influence costs) is that only one that resolves the selective intervention problem ? However, there is a need to tie these perspectives to empirical work on the firm size distribution and firm growth ? It remains to be seen whether precise relationships can be drawn between these frameworks and observable firm size 2. Capital Structure ? Modigliani and Miller (1958, 1963) established that capital structure is irrelevant: the value o&lt;/p&gt;</p>。