A study on the role of the nonprofit and cooperative sector in the market economy

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Nonprofit and cooperative firms have often been discussed from historical and conceptual viewpoints so far. In this research project, I attempted to study these types of firms from an analytical standpoint based on economics as a social science.The results obtained in this research project can be summarized as follows. First, I compared several organizational forms of firms in standard microeconomic theory. Second, in this analytical framework, I showed that the sunk costs of physical capital play an important role in the determination of the organizational form of firms. Third, I constructed a model of an alternative economic system based on consumer cooperatives and the market for their membership.